One of the most frustrating thing about Nokia’s portfolio of devices is the lack of consistency on lots of little things in the software experience. From icon placement, to font sizes, to ways of locking your phone so you don’t accidentally dial someone just by sitting down. One thing that’s driven me up the wall is how different devices, mainly Eseries vs. Nseries devices, had different ways of notifying the user of incoming text messages, missed calls, etc. On Nseries devices, like the iPhone, you’d get an update that would show up at the bottom of your screen, and you had to either respond to it immediately, or simply ignore it and then have a little icon that reminded you that “oh yea, I should check my inbox for that text I got 3 hours ago and totally forgot about!”
On a Nokia Eseries device, mind you they haven’t made the jump to touch screen yet, the most advanced, the E72, is stuck on S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2, has a custom home screen notification line that kept all your alerts neat and organized. It made so much sense, and it made you think why this layout wasn’t adopted to other devices? It’s how Nokia uses Symbian. Different teams (Eseries, Nseries, etc.) take the same Symbian core and then tweak it, add to it, modify it to best suite their needs. Rarely have the changes each group committed been back ported to the main Symbian software, which is why you’ll see different UIs for different Nokia smartphones. It’s terribly frustrating.
Anyway, Nokia is now looking to improve the notifications on their touch screen device line. Similar to S60 3rd Edition, and the iPhone, when you get a notification you either have to react to it immediately or dismiss it and remember to come back to it in the future. With the beta release of “Nokia Notifications“, the Finnish company is looking to get your opinion of their interpretation of how notifications should work. It only works on the Nokia N97 and N97 Mini, which is a bummer, but if even positive feedback is given then you can expect every touchscreen Nokia device due to launch in 2011 or 2012 to have this homescreen widget installed by default.
Check it out for yourself. I’d tell you if it was awesome or not, but I dumped Symbian and Nokia like the plague earlier this year. I’m digging Android’s notification system, and Apple recently hired the guy who did Palm’s webOS notifications so you know they know their notification system sucks, and they’re working to improve it.
[Photo via “The Nokia Blog“]