A simple matter of…

This is aimed fair and square at Nokia, but applies to many other companies too. I’ve been lucky enough to get a new Nokia E60. It has built-in wifi access, but whilst surfing the web is all well and good, it’s tricky from a phone. The _real_ use is for internet telephony and for this reason they include a SIP stack (the VoIP standard).

Now let’s go through my complaints:

• phone is slow as molasses - 1-2s to respond to each button press.
• SIP stack is next to useless. It works ~30% of the time at best here is a good description (I’m wyvern BTW). No response from nokia, no email response from nokia. Considing that this is the _main point_ of the phone this is nothing short of diabolical. They won’t get money from _me_ this way.
• SIP only even attempts to use wlan access points you have told it - in fact the whole way the AP/SIP/VoIP settings work seems to show a complete lack of understandnig on how the phone should work
• SIP/wireless settings work _completely_ differently to internet/wireless (see above). The internet setttings are almost sane.
• practically no applications exist. They’ve changed the security model so now no old series60 applications work. Marvellous. All you get is a “not supported” message.
• ring volume seems to start very quiet and then go very loud - no gradual increase.
• backup over Bluetooth took about 5mins.
• battery life is poor IMO. especially with wifi on too.
• phonebook
  • I have a backup of my Nokia 6310i addressbook. Taken with Nokia PC suite. But the new Nokia PC suite doesn”t understand the old format and refuses to put it onto the phone.
  • pc suite backup stores addressbook in a proprietary format. So I can’t create one and use that.
  • phone doesn’t appear to have “copy from/to SIM” options like my older phones.

Best phone I ever had - Nokia 6310i - it just worked ™. Amazing battery life (about 2 weeks if I was lucky), fast response - unlike all these fancy phones where you constantly have to wait after each button press.

Overall, bloat and inefficiency seem to rule the roost. This isn’t progress, this is akin to buerocracy in a consumer device.

How should it work? Have a look at the amazing FMA if you are lucky enough to own a Sony-Ericsson. This uses standard vCard format files I also wrote a small app to convert from Nokia’’s old “Phonebook.ncc” format to vCard format. This is how I imported my 6310i phonebook into the SE K700 I had.