OSNews

NeoLander, good points you raised, lets see if I can cover all of them:

The Browser
Yep, Opera Mobile give Nokia a hand here (I have both mobile and mini installed, and only use this last one while on UMTS/GRPS to save some euros), but still, you kind of feel like a browser is an important part of a smartphone and such behavior from Nokia doesn't quite feel right.

The E-Mail
I am aware indeed of the attached HTML file (kind of like some OpenSource groupware suites in the webmail interface). But when I click it, lol, my all times favorite browser is fired up :p I know the E63 is not the beefiest phone around, but nowadays, specially in this segment of devices, I would say that the phone could at least have an option to automatically show the messages in HTML (not open them in the browser tho). That way, users could choose if they want clear text or HTML to suite everyone's needs.

1) I wasn't aware that the calendar was suffering from this blow as well :| The way I see it: if such basic things were left untouched, I wonder how's the rest... Can't avoid feeling pessimistic on this one.

2) In my case (very often), if I call someone and that someone gives me a busy tone, I press the Red button to go back to the home screen and so whatever I need to do. The thing is, while the busy tone is playing (and it doesn't stop for about 3 or 4 seconds), the phone application kind of freezes.

3) It is useful if you are a techie in certain scenarios. For me it is useful, plus, if I can see security information of the network, why can't I possibly see my IP?

4) & 5) Yep, Opera covered the gap here, more or less.

6) I did the update hoping that most of the issues I described here were gone.... yeah....

7) Hum, indeed, but for an E series and full qwerty keyboard, I would expect more as well. Forgot to mention the price as well: €150 unlocked in store, not a bad deal at all!


New phone
Either Android or iPhone OS (on an iPod Touch, as I don't want data plans and paying more than €500 for a phone is not in my plans). I need a smartphone to take with me everywhere, that's the truth. The main reasons that lead me to buy this phone were wifi, built in VoIP client, e-mail and SSH (via PuTTY, installed separately). I will not go back to symbian until Nokia ditches the OVI store, which lacks content and organization. Besides that, I've seen symbian in the early days and I don't like the evolution it took since the release of 3rd edition phones (and trust me, IO was symbian ALL THE WAY!)

PS: pcSuite is constantly nagging me with updates, when all there is is a new software to install (OVI Suite), nothing to update.

Nokia, hope you guys are reading this!

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.