To be able to sit down with the men who gave rise to such an awful looking device and have them justify their reasoning would make for a hell of a video. I don’t want to confront them, just let them explain why they made such a weird looking product. I have a short list of Nokia (NYSE: NOK) phones that should’ve never left the prototype stage, and the N91 is right up there.

It is C|Net Austrilia’s biggest let down of 2006, and it is obvious to see why.

Just looking at this keyboard is giving me blisters:

If a music player can know what songs I like by the number of times I play a certain song … why can’t a smartphone know what I like to do with my it by tracking my work flow?

My hand already knows: hit the menu key, down 2, over 3, hit enter on the joystick and my phone now does something.

Why does it have to be like that? Windows XP has the "most used applications" thing going on in its smart start bar, why can’t something similar be adapted to a phone?

Everyone uses a phone differently, yet we all adapt to our phones strict menu hierarchy … why is it in 2007 our phones can’t adapt to what we want to do with them?

I really wish the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) User Experience team, if such a team exists, started a blog. I’m not talking about the guys who make the UI, I’m talking about the guys who dictate the menu structures, icon placement, the guys responsible for making everything "feel" right. I’ll come back to the iPod analogy, there were a lot of MP3 players before the iPod, and a lot were released after the iPod. The ease of use, drain dead simple UI is what shoehorned it’s success in the market and locked it in.

Nokia (NYSE: NOK)’s S60 user interface is a sprawling mess: even Nokia can’t seem to remember where it’s put the configuation options. You’ll find Bluetooth over here, Profile settings over there, and something like SIP buried four menus down. Themes is nowhere near Display.

Source: The Register

Tommi Vilkamo’s reply:

Touché. The situation used to be that sad, indeed.

Luckily, we have recently made significant improvements in making the settings more logical. Already in Nokia N95, which is based on S60 3rd Edition FP1, there is a general settings application, from which you can do all the settings. That is, in addition to having the settings in applications, application related settings are found from the general settings app as well.

Andrew, please let us know what you think about the new approach

Source: Tommi’s S60 applications blog

Who is "we?"

Can I contact said team? Do they have a blog up? Are the usability experts or engineers? Why is the difference between S40 usability and S60 usability so vast?

One would think that for an OS designed to be on smart phones it would have an interface laid out a little bit better than something you see on a regular Motorola (NYSE: MOT) device. Symbian is easy, but it’s one of those operating systems you have to play around with for a whole day or two to familiarize yourself with where everything is. Then again … aren’t all operating systems the same way?

We’re officially in 2007 and we’re still using the same icon and grid model in buried menu’s that’s been around for as long as I can remember. The Palm (NSDQ: PALM) Treo 680 has a wicked front end that uses tabs, it separates tasks a user might preform to designated tabs labeled by a picture on the screen. Such a simple idea yet such an exponential increase in user friendliness. Why aren’t we seeing the same innovations out of Nokia?

More importantly, who is going to make the first 3D OS that isn’t just bling but actually makes using a phone an enjoyable and friendly experience?

I just came home (04:06) from a New Year’s Day Party which was quite revealing. We had a Nintendo Wii with one controller being shared amongst 4 players, in between turns people of course would play with their mobile phones. Entire conversations were being started when everyone was showing off pictures they took or newly acquired ring tones. I got a chance to play with a relatively new Samsung slider phone, a Windows Mobile candy bar style device, and an LG Chocolate.

Each device had a completely different operating system, and user experience, but none have made me go "whoa that’s awesome!" My Nokia (NYSE: NOK) E61 doesn’t even make me go "whoa!"

So what is this "whoa" factor? All you have to do is look at Windows Vista, Mac OS X, and more recently Beryl for Linux. The subtle fade ins and outs, 3D effects, audio queues, and innovate ways to manipulate windows and media, these are all things that make my experience richer and make me go "whoa!" To this day I can vividly remember the first time I played with OS X and saw that crazy dock and expose, Windows Vista with its subtle bling, and finally got Beryl to run that famed cube desktop manager on my Ubuntu box.

So while yes Nokia is making phones with powerful 3D graphics engines for the sake of the next generation N-Gage platform, what are they doing to harness this power to make my interface experience a memorable and visually striking one?

Goodnight for me, and enjoy your lunch (12:06) Finland!

My rant pertaining to my lust for the death of the PC suite presented itself with a small problem.

I want to be able to access and modify any of the data stored on my phone over a web browser. What would basically happen is you take your phone, run an application, let’s call it "Net Mode" and it turns on a mobile web server allowing real time access to your data. This application pings a gateway server to establish a solid, hopefully encrypted, IP connection, which then lets you access a website, where a user must authenticate, giving you total control of your device.

Here is my issue: What happens if the connection is on my LAN? As in I’m at home, laptop connected to my router via wifi and so is my E61. Do you really want your data bouncing from your E61 to a server in Finland back to you? Then it hit me … count the number of hops between both devices. If it only takes one hop from the IP address of my ThinkPad to the IP of my E61 then the gateway server would tell the site hosted at Nokia (NYSE: NOK) to use the local (192.168.1.XXX) IP addresses of my devices instead of the external (70.247.189.XXX) ones. Not only does it reduce latency but it increases throughput.

I really need a white board and a board room to clearly explain this, I know I’m going to make quite a few people raise their eyebrows trying to figure out what I’m trying to explain here.

Direct link to video

Source: TechEBlog

Little request: combine that beautiful Hitachi 2.9 inch 800×400 screen with a slide out QWERTY keyboard like this, and I’ll fall in love.

I doubt this will happen since a device like that would eat up the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Communicator market share.

This isn’t my annoyance since I don’t use VoIP but it’s PhoneBoy’s, and boy o boy does he know how to rant:

Luca reminded me
today that I like to push the limits of my devices. I push my phones to
their breaking point. My phone bounces between GPRS and WiFi multiple
times a day, sometimes connected via both. Between that, Bluetooth, and
Podcasts, yes, I can easily run my phone battery down in a day,
sometimes less.

But today, I’ve been a bit frustrated with my Nokia (NYSE: NOK) phones. The
issue I am about to write about is something I’ve run into in various
Nokia Series 60 devices, particularly on the N and E series phones. It
involves that thing that makes the phone more than just the phone–the
networking stack, and how applications use it. The applications I will
refer to will be only applications that are included as part of a
factory default configuration, i.e. no third-party apps.

Source: PhoneBoy

I suggest you read his entire piece, I never knew such problems existed. Then again me and Ken Camp already came to the conclusion that everyone uses their phone in a different way. PhoneBoy seems to be pushing these S60 devices to their limits, which is good since he can now point out their faults.

Here’s one tip I have for you PhoneBoy: Use the RSS reader in Opera Mini, it’s MUCH better than the one built in to S60 devices.

1. The Nokia (NYSE: NOK) PC Suite needs to become something we access via a browser, not an application we install. The current implantation is bloat and frankly thanks to technologies today like AJAX and the Symbian port of Apache called Raccoon we should never have to install that program … ever again.
2. Hitachi began mass production of 2.9 inch screens with a resolution of 800×400. That is enough DPI to give an opthamologist an erection. There should be a Nokia phone out on the market by the end of 2007 that supports such a screen.
3. S60 needs to become componentized in order to offer the best experience for users. One shouldn’t need an entire firmware upgrade just to upgrade the music player application, or the web browser. The core of S60 should remain the core and all other peripheral applications should be made into components; similar to what Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) does with Windows XP embedded. I use Opera for Mobile because I’ll never be able to use the web browser you have locked in to S60v3FP1.
4. The PIM needs a retooling. Get all the design engineers a Treo 680 and make them use that as their exclusive device for a month. I’m not saying Palm (NSDQ: PALM) is better than Symbian, what I am saying is that certain aspects of their operating system are done so well it’s amazing that no one has yet to emulate it.
5. 2.5 mm headphone jacks are useless, when was the last time you walked into a store and you saw them sell headphones with a 2.5 mm jack? If you’re going to sell a music phone then make sure it has a 3.5 mm jack. The 5300 was a disgrace. I want to meet the design team who decided to market a phone specifically tailored for music and not include a headphone jack.
6. Pop port has got to go away. Mini USB is the future, and so far a lot of the devices you seem to be cranking out as of recent have said interface. Continue this trend.
7. Relating to number 6: Mini USB should also take place of the charger. Why should we have to plug one cable in to charge and one cable in to sync? Look at the iPod if you want to know what I’m talking about.
8. The hand writing recognition engine that the Nokia Internet Tablet uses needs to be taken out, thrown in the trash, soaked in gasoline, and lit on fire.
9. A team needs to be created to begin porting VLC over to Symbian as well as for the Internet Tablet. Real Player is absolute nonsense and can’t handle nearly as many file formats as VLC can. Not to mention VLC will stream any file format. While you’re at it, start adding SMB support so I can access my files over my network!
10. Begin a marketing blitz in America to show consumers the advantages of going unlocked.
11. Sony Ericson phones use XEON based camera flash technology while you’re still using LED’s. It’s about time you switched, people can tell a difference in the quality.
12. Call Canon or Nikon and license their CMOS sensors to put into your Camera Phones. You guys rock at making phones, time to admit that you can’t make the best optics engines and call in the pros.
13. By the end of 2007 I expect you to have released a successor to the N93 that can record HD video.
14. I expect you to release a lot more phones with a full blown QWERTY keyboard running your latest version of S60.
15. The Nokia N95 is the first of many cell phones to come with a discrete graphics processor. Take advantage of this and create a slick 3D operating system that will wow people. The whole icons in a grid thing has been done since the 20th century. Time to move on.
16. The concept videos you showed off at Nokia world are amazing, I’d invest heavily in research to begin making a phone that has no buttons and everything is done by touch. I doubt such a device will be released in 2007, but definitely in 2008.
17. People in emerging markets might not have the proper infrastructure to charge their mobile phones as often as they would like. Announce a phone for emerging markets that can be recharged via solar cells in 2007.
18. Announce an international warranty so people can feel comfortable importing a Nokia phone from Europe yet having it be serviceable in the United States.
19. Every device you sell that contains S60 should be able to view and edit office documents and read PDF’s regardless of being an E or N series product.
20. Create a phone so advanced that it can be put in a dock, and this dock would have several USB ports, audio out, and VGA or DVI out. The one laptop per child idea is foolish; there isn’t an infrastructure to support it. What if each of those children had a device the size of an N73 that they can bring to a local center, plug it in, and now use a full size monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Or apply the same scenario to emerging markets.
21. Open a flagship store in the Dallas/Fort Worth area

Feel free to contribute guys! I’m interested in hearing what you want to see come out of Nokia!

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 what the calculator looks like on my E61:

Now I’m not saying it does it’s job poorly, a calculator is a calculator, but the UI is brutal. Can we get something a little bit more efficient? Better yet, why not include an advanced mode?

Check this application out:

The UI on that one is even more frightening, but it has advanced options.

Message I’m trying to convey is there isn’t anything you can do feature wise to improve a calculator. All the work that lies in making "Calculator Application A" better than "Calculator Application B" is in the user interface department.

So please Nokia (NYSE: NOK), make it easier to use, and bring the advanced features as an option. All you have to look at is the Windows calculator to see that by default it does it’s job very well, but then you can go into the settings and reveal a scientific computing powerhouse.