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Well, you know, I wrote that post in a hurry, and when I rode it again I discovered that it was lacking in many areas... Will complete it here, hope you like the new version even more


Well, Symbian 9.3 dates back from 2007, where if I remember well the web browser wasn't seen as such an important part of smartphones, except by Apple who just released the iPhone thing (which still ran on EDGE and couldn't receive MMSs). I've heard that Symbian^3 behaves much more nicely on the web.

The main problem with this imo is not that Nokia made an incapable browser at that time, but that they don't backports new releases of symbian to other phones.

On the other hand, doing that on low-performance hardware like the E63's could be quite difficult... After all, with no application open, my E63 has 23MB of free ram according to PC suite, and symbian is not very good at swapping...

(PS : Did you know that you can use mini-like data compression on opera mobile ? Just use opera turbo, that you can enable on the settings panel. It makes access times quite worse, though.)


Sounds like a good idea indeed, maybe you should report it to the symbian foundation (like your other gripes with the OS). I often think of doing that myself, but when looking at those shiny newer releases of symbian I have the feeling that they'll tell me most of it is already fixed.


On a more positive note, one of the highest ranked feature requests on symbian foundation's website is a trash, so part of the cancel issue might be subject to change...


Hmmm... Annoying indeed. What effect has pressing the home button in the hope that the application closes itself in the background while you can do whatever you want ? Is the phone completely frozen ?


Good point. After all, that network information screen will only be watched by techies anyway.


Indeed, I bought it at around €260 myself Not twice as much but nearly. Was yours brand new ?

In my case, I tend to be more kind towards my E63 because I've tried lower-end full keyboard phones before. The LG KS 360 especially was memorable. If you think that symbian 9.3 is buggy and unpolished, never try this one. In fact, don't try it even if you don't think so. Before it, I had never seen in my life a phone which doesn't even manage to reliably delete all SMSs in the inbox ><. My E63 was an attempt to go mid-end in order to get some polish and nice features without spending too much in a high-end phone I have no use for, and it did work...


Well, hope that you won't find the Android equivalent of my LG360... AFAIK, polished touchscreen phones are still for rich people, but if you don't need to make calls the iTouch might indeed be a good option.


Well, some days ago I tried to download a specific app (Skype), and for such a use case it works quite well. My own issues with OVI store is...
-Infamous loading times
-Often forces you to update, which can make your phone dreadfully slow for minutes before you can actually get your app.
-It took them a lot of time before user account and app downloading and installing was done right (though now it finally works properly)


Didn't have this chance, I discovered symbian with 9.3 and only noticed that many nice apps from the past can't be used anymore (nethack, EEmame... I'll miss you).

Well, it's surely far from perfect, but there's several things which makes it good enough for me to give it a second chance with my next phones...
-E-Mail and texts, my #1 means of communication by far, work very well
-The homescreen is just perfect, once you've set it up properly. Never seen something like that on my previous phones, nor on phones and mobile devices I see around. WiPho7 plans to bring something like this, but I'm not sure their implementation will be as good. For a combination of instant access to applications AND instant knowledge about what's going on, the symbian homescreen is a pure wonder.
-The main menu is properly organized (except in the settings region), instead of being a stupid and unsearchable heap of applications.
-Aside from doing what I want, this phone and the OVI ecosystem bring a lot of well-polished extras on the table when you look for them. Youtube, Opera Mobile, Skype, Funambol, the calculator and the translator, the file browser...

Then, the thing requires some developer love and lots of polish before adding any new feature to the mix, in my opinion. Specifically, the following should be fixed :
-The aforementioned cancel issue
-The out of memory issue. There should be more free memory for apps, and background apps should just be swapped out instead of wasting precious memory.
-The occasional slowdowns and lockups of the interface. They should not exist. On a sidenote, killing apps should be a near-instant process.
-Opera mobile should be better integrated in the system and made the default browser. Except if they manage to get their webkit-based monster fixed, which would be the best option of course.
-Management of multiple Wi-Fi networks is ridiculously bad. I can't set several networks as preferred networks, so since I equally use two wi-fi networks (home and work), I have to put the default network setting on "always ask" mode. It's highly annoying.
-On the same wi-fi topic... Currently, if your wi-fi network's signal strength is too low, symbian won't detect it as a preferred AP and hence not show it in the network list. And you can't reload that list either. You're more or less stuck with canceling your current task and starting over.