Video Review of Calcium: Why aren’t you built in?
By Stefan Constantinescu on Saturday, December 30th, 2006 at 3:17 PM PST In Ideas and rants, Videos
The video and audio quality is DECENT at best. Thank my Canon Powershot A510 for that. It’s great at doing photos, never knew it would be this bad at video however.
All that aside now, I made a blog post earlier citing that the calculator built into S60v3 is quite bad. The UI is cumbersome. Mark from the Nokia Blog left a comment and told me to check out Calcium … I’m in love.
This application is user interface design at it’s finest. Screenshots couldn’t do it justice so I just made a quick little video. You can download the AVI (20 MB) directly or just watch this embedded flash:
I love their example, it really is something the guys at Nokia (NYSE: NOK) should strive for:
Try this simple example: start the standard calculator and do 2/3 x 7. It takes 13 clicks. Using Calcium it only takes 6!
I know for a fact that Palm (NSDQ: PALM) had a tap counter working for them. His job was literally to count the number of taps it took to get something done. Nokia should get a similar expert for click counting.
Thanks for the recommendation Mark!
UPDATE: Message I’m trying to bring home with this video is that little interface modifications like this go a long way in to improving the user experience. The calculator built in to S60 sure does a lot more, but it looks like a Windows 3.1 application. mtvoid made calculations sexy, and using the joystick in this fashion, in my honest opinion, makes things easier.
The thing with the clicks is fully nonsense. It takes just 6 clicks with the standard calculator too.
Nokia integrated the / * + – buttons since Firmware v2(E61) for use in standard calculator. There is no need for Calcium on E61 anymore because the standard one is able to do more – for example: square root and something about percentage.
I still find Calcium easier to use.
I do agree tho that the Nokia calculator does more, for my quick day to day mathematical usage Calcium is the way to go. Looks better, and it’s easier to use with one hand.
This is another case of “I’m going to use more than one application to do the same thing”
For those days when I need to do advanced data manipulation however I’ll probably have my TI-89 in my back pocket.
Calcium rocks!
http://www.e-series.org/archives/74
Actually creating Calcium-like calculator should not take too much time and investment. I don’t see a reason why Nokia doesn’t improve their calculator application.
Recently, I bought a Samsung phone (very basic one). Surprisingly, it has Calcium-like calculator already.
Calsium is good only in simple calculations. Remember that it can’t remember or show for example the amounts or figures you have put in. With the built in one it’s easy just scroll up and see if you made mistakes in your numbers.