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Video Review of Calcium: Why aren’t you built in?

Categories: Ideas and rants, Videos
By: , IntoMobile
Saturday, December 30th, 2006 at 3:17 PM

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:


Click To Play

Here is a a link to where you can download the application: mtvoid

I love their example, it really is something the guys at Nokia 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 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.

About The Author

Stefan Constantinescu

Stefan Constantinescu (@WhatTheBit on Twitter) has loved technology since as far back as he can remember. It started with computers, but in the past few years his passion has turned to mobile devices. As a mobile phone enthusiast who lives and breathes devices that connect to the internet, he knows he is not alone with this radical fascination of all things wireless. He is strongly opinionated and enjoys a good debate so leave comments in his posts and he’ll get back to you! Stefan began blogging as a hobby in the fall of 2006 and joined IntoMobile in the summer of 2007. Later he got a job at Nokia in March 2008, but as of June 2009 he has rejoined the IntoMobile team. He is currently based out of Helsinki, Finland.

  • Oposum

    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.

  • Stefan Constantinescu

    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.

  • Antony Pranata

    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.

  • Henrikki

    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.