Symbian recently announced that its OS has powered 100 million phones. That's not bad - it's a lot of licences - but then, mobile phones shift around a billion units a year now. But a phone with Symbian isn't any old phone. It's a smartphone.
A smartphone is a cross between a PDA and a mobile. It does all the typical cellphone stuff that a plain old dumb featurephone does - take and display photos and video, record sound, play music, send and receive text messages and emails, play games, store your address book and calendar, let you load additional applications.
Oh, and call people, if you're a bit of a luddite that way.
On top of this, smartphones can browse the Web - not crippled half-assed efforts like WAP and iMode, but the real Javascript-driven, Flash-based HTTPS Intarwebs. That is, if the site doesn't detect you're on a phone and obligingly cripple itself so you can't actually use it. (Well done, Amazon!) Smartphones let you view and edit documents from your PC, run advanced apps like GPS, handle push email from your office complete with attachments, stuff like that.
So if Symbian is so good at all this - three times as much as all its rivals put together - how come dumb phones outsell smartphones ten times over?
Because a smartphone is a PC in your pocket. I'm on my second. First was a Nokia 7710. And yes, it runs Symbian. It's a direct descendant of the Psion 5 series of 1990s PDAs: it has a big, near-VGA res screen and pretty much the same GUI as the Psion - and the Nokia 770 Internet tablet gadget, come to that. But it's a phone, so it has no keyboard. Only the 7710 doesn't have a keypad, either, so you have to dial numbers and enter texts by tapping the screen with a stylus - or retracted biro or fingernail or chopstick or whatever's to hand once you lose the built-in one a month after you buy it.
It's just like having a tablet PC, only smaller. It can do almost anything - run VOIP apps or instant messenger, I can write my own code for it, all that sort of thing. And also like a PC, it takes five minutes to boot, slows to a crawl or crashes when overloaded, has a folder-oriented point-and-click WIMP interface and needs to be recharged every night.
People see it's a whizzy phone, ask for a look, and then recoil from the icon-filled double-clicky interface. (Forty-eight apps on the opening screen.) I can send a text in less than half the time on my old 6310i, which incidentally also runs for about a week on a single charge.
But it's so damned useful that I was wedded to it. My life was in there, as it used to be in my Psion. But it was a lousy replacement for a Psion - slow, unreliable, short battery life, no keyboard, tiny hard-to-read screen. It's also a lousy phone: big, clunky, unreliable, short battery life, slow-running and both complex and slow to operate. But the pairing is hard to resist.
Thing is, on my Psion, I could write on the move. I can't on the 7710. Even if I balance it on my £80 folding Bluetooth keyboard, merely sustained fast typing is enough to crash the phone.
So I bought a cheap old Psion netBook on eBay. Big bright colour screen, great keyboard, gigs of CF, battery life of a week, and surfs the Web via Wifi. It's great for writing on the move, but it's too big to carry around just in case I might need it.
Next, I replaced the Nokia with an HTC Universal - an Orange SPV M5000, also known as a Qtek 9000 or an O2 XDA Exec or a T-Mobile MDA Pro.
Interestingly, the phone and the netBook (strictly, a 7Book, i.e., a Series 7 with a netBook ROM DIMM) share a number of design features: StrongARM-family CPU, clamshell design, miniature QWERTY keyboard, 640*480 VGA-res colour touchscreen LCD, expansion via solid-state cards, wireless networking and infrared, ROM-based OS designed for usage on the move & sync to a PC, including limited file compatibility, and so on.
Yet the late-1990s netBook is in almost every way a better, cleaner, simpler design, with a more flexible and pleasant UI. The WinMob device, despite more than twice the speed, nearly 10x the memory and far more functionality - phone, Bluetooth, integral Wifi, still camera + video camera and so on - feels cobbled-together and very poorly designed and integrated. I adore its functionality - it's a smartphone, camera, MP3 player and usable WLAN Web terminal - but boy does the implementation suck! I had heard that Windows Mobile 5 was finally getting reasonably polished. Yeccch! If this is the polished, refined, 5th-generation product, I really hate to imagine what its rougher predecessors were like! It's appalling!
Understand, I'm not criticizing the form factor of the phone. A subnotebook-sized cell phone would be very silly. It would be better if it was Nokia Communicator sized and shaped, to be honest, but even so, its tiny keyboard is utterly dreadful, with a remarkable profusion of design howlers. The hotkey to launch IE is right next to the tiny space bar, so every few words you type, you flip into the web browser by mistake. There are no "<" and ">" characters, so HTML is right out. There's no Control key, so you can't cut/copy/paste, but there are irritating hotkeys for various programs built right into the main alphabetic cluster. There are 2 pairs of make/break call buttons, which screams thoughtless design.
The simplest change would be to move the app hotkeys onto the screen fascia, in accordance with standard handheld PC design. Oh, and bin the duplicate call/hang up keys, while moving the dedicated buttons on the hinge to somewhere accessible with the machine open or closed. There's lots of wasted space around the edge of the screen it would get them out of the alpha cluster, and with the space thus freed up, the keyboard could gain a Control key, a right Shift key, maybe even an Alt key and a right-mouse-button key like a real Windows machine, and still be more spacious and better laid-out!
- "Smartphone, 1/2"
- "Smartphone, 2/2"
