Before even starting this little look back, I noted that it's sad that I'm only talking about Nokia here - go back another couple of years and we had Sony Ericsson and Samsung both onboard with producing Symbian-powered hardware. Still, by January 2011, the Symbian Foundation (experiment) was in tatters, its high profile CEO, Lee Williams, had scarpered, and Nokia was left to keep the whole show on the road. Let's see how it did...
We'll take the software side first, since it's more topical to AAS. From the original piece (and with large chunks trimmed down for the sake of brevity):
1. Fix the memory and processor leaks.... Yes, it's impossible to make a modern smartphone 100% bug free, but a little attention to real world reliability would be appreciated, Nokia.
We've since had Symbian Anna and then Belle and Belle Refresh (or FP1 and 2 for newer devices) and memory leaks have been banished for ages. My gut feel is that Anna fixed them all, so only a few months after my article came out.
2. This one needs no introduction really - and Nokia are well aware of it. The current Symbian web browser needs work. It needs a faster javascript engine, it needs better awareness of (and optimisation for) bloated multi-megabyte web pages, so that nothing can trip it up, it needs to crash with bogus memory errors less, and perhaps most of all, it needs more intelligence in terms of content...
Well, Web has been optimsed again and again and, honestly, it's better than it was - but it was always fighting a losing battle, against processors that simply weren't fast enough and web sites which were growing in terms of complexity and byte size. Yes, a complete rewrite might have gained another 25% in rendering speed, but at this stage in Nokia and Symbian's plans there just wasn't the will or the manpower for this.
3. Nokia Messaging ('Email') needs fixing...
Again, this did improve from version to version and I've been using Nokia Email more or less every day for two years. It does the job and no more. It's never fast and often renders 'rich' emails in two goes. So you start reading something and then the whole thing renders again, but in a different size font. Messy. The application never really recovered from the 'Nokia Messaging' (service) debacle, in my opinion...
4. Nokia Social also needs a big fix-up. To be honest, given that this is built on Web runtime and not something complicated, I simply fail to understand why it's taking Nokia so long to fix its shortcomings... More than cosmetic is its performance, posting a status update or tweet often takes over ten seconds - if WRT wasn't up to the job then Nokia Social should have been implemented in C++ or Qt. Optimisation or rewriting needed. And, while the programmer is back on the job, stick in support for other social networks...
Yet again, an application which could have done with a complete rewrite and which was repeatedly optimised in the hope that it would be good 'enough'. In fairness, I've a soft spot for Nokia Social, in that it's a great way to post to both Facebook and Twitter at the same time, and all from Gallery if needed. It's integrated surprisingly well and it does the job for many newcomers to smartphones and casual social users, I suspect. But, honestly, it needed to have been rewritten completely in C++ or Qt, given AMOLED-friendly dark theme options and sped up by at least a factor of two.
5. S60, sorry Symbian's, homescreens have been gradually improving for years. The current arrangement, with three homescreens of six widgets/panels each, is pretty flexible, even if not everyone uses all three. But each slot is quite small, in terms of pixels, around 90 pixels high, which really limits what can 'show through' from the underlying application.... What's needed are resizeable widget slots, or at the very least, the flexibility of having double-height slots...
Symbian Belle introduced several different widget sizes and most people are now quite happy with Symbian's homescreen arrangement. There are now well over 50 widgets to choose from, plus a number from third parties.
6. Updates. A word that no doubt instills fear into the hearts of the Ovi Store development team. They've spent two years putting off implementing code for the Ovi Store client to monitor what's on your phone and check for version updates. There's an unwritten rule for decent apps that they simply do the checking and upgrading themselves (TweetS60 and Gravity are both excellent at this, for example) - but the store client should really handle all this as well...
Thankfully, this got fixed fairly soon after my article was published. And, aside from my complaints about the speed and intrusiveness of the Qt Smart Installer, the 'Update all' in the Nokia Store these days works very well and is up in the same ballpark as other smartphone OS.
7. Completely replace the clunky ABCDEFG quick matching code when picking a Contact. Yes, it's all very clever how the lists of letters get whittled down, but it's a usability nightmare. I dread names which start with a letter after "O" and hate the way all the letter picks move around, forcing you to completely stop after every screen tap to see where the next letter you want has moved to... Replace it with a standard portrait qwerty keyboard...
I honestly can't remember when this got fixed. Perhaps in the Anna update, soon after my original article - either way, contact searching is now trivial and intuitive by QWERTY input. And has been for some time.
8. Completely replace the Camera interface. It was just about acceptable in the initial Nokia 5800 - after all, this was the S60 team's first stab at a touch interface, so who knew what it should look like? But, incredulously, this code has scarcely been touched for two years...
This got tweaked several times during the Anna and Belle updates, mainly reducing some of the 'taps' needed to accomplish various photography tasks. It became, I think, good enough, though it was left to the Nokia 808 and Belle FP1/FP2 to bring in a next generation interface that was competitive with the best of Android camera interfaces. Even today, going back to the Camera app on a Belle Refreshed' device like the N8 or C7 is a bit of a shock to the system, though I suspect it's now too late to bring the 808's Camera app to the older phones.
9. For once and for all, sort out the handling of album art. Yes, there are at least three different systems for embedding/attaching artwork to music tracks and folders, but don't just stop at one - put in a few lines of extra code to support all three. It's downright embarrassing when I scroll through my music collection in front of a friend and 90% of my music has just a big grey 'music note' icon.
Album art detection did get better, in Symbian Anna, I suspect - but wasn't helped by changes from Apple in their iTunes software, which started putting album art only in its own proprietary databases. The end result was that the situation didn't get better and at least we had the likes of Cover Up! to help fix Symbian's music library on each phone.
10. Finally, and those who know me well will have been waiting for mention of these, but bring back Podcasting (or build in and help fix up Podcatcher) and Nokia Internet Radio - the S60 5th Edition version is a travesty under Symbian^3 and needs some serious optimisation so that it doesn't cut out when you leave it in the background.
Nokia Internet Radio came back and still works well to this day, but Podcasting couldn't be recovered from the Symbian Foundation Open Source code mess. Thankfully, Podcatcher and Poddi are better clients and do much the same job.
Overall, then, a mixed report card for Nokia. If it had been dedicated to Symbian, I'd have expected all ten points to have been addressed, not just half of them. In the context of a company in crisis and transformation at every level, I sympathise, though. In fact, even the appearance of the various Belle updates proved a welcome surprise in the prevailing climate.
Perhaps the biggest downside of the performance above was that new users, who wouldn't have the benefit of AAS-reader arch-geek knowledge, would struggle with all the built-in components above and wouldn't have found out about replacement browsers, social clients and media applications.
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The '10 things' piece quoted above was the companion article to another, '5 things Nokia are doing wrong in hardware'. Here are some choice quotes (and my current responses) to that piece too...
It should be borne in mind that there are a lot of things that Nokia has got right in terms of their smartphone hardware, from the aforementioned memory increases to better screen technology to newer OS (Symbian^3) to USB on the Go and Pentaband connectivity. However, all the positives are not going to stop me going on a little bit of a rant. Well, five rants, in fact....
Indeed. The very fact that the software rant went to 10 things and the hardware one was only 5 tells the story that Nokia was doing more right with hardware...
1. EDoF Cameras. Also known as 'full focus' cameras. Please let me set the record straight here - I do appreciate the precise technology required to make an EDoF lens and custom electronics, it's no small feat. And I've been on the leading edge of journalists who have covered Nokia's use of EDoF in its less 'professional' smartphones - taking a good photo with EDoF in good light is almost foolproof - which is doubtless why Nokia is championing the technology. In the C6-01, it's a great choice of technology - the average buyer wouldn't know how to take a decent auto-focus photo anyway and would likely have no use for 'macro' focussing. For these users, EDoF makes perfect sense....
But the bottom line has to be that EDoF should not be rolled out as the 'standard' Nokia camera technology - it's ultimately too limiting, and too easily misunderstood by reviewers - which then has a big knock on effect in terms of sales.
Although the X7 and E6 were to be announced shortly after my article went live and these did, indeed, have EDoF cameras, as did the tiny Nokia 700, we also then had the EDoF 'phase 2' camera in the quite impressive Nokia 701 and then the mighty auto-focus camera in the 808 PureView. Plus auto-focus cameras in the N9 and all the Lumias running Windows Phone, so it does seem as though most of Nokia's smartphones will avoid EDoF in the future. For which reviewers and users breathe a sigh of relief.
2. Speakers. Speaking to the owner of a phone shop recently, I was told that they'd had several people buy the Nokia N8 and then return it a few days later because the speaker was absolute rubbish and they could never hear when someone was calling. Mystified, I took out my N8 and played a tune rather loudly for all to hear. "Ah, but when the phone is on the sofa, or in a case, the speaker aperture is blocked and the sound can't get out!"... Certainly having people return an incredibly highly specified camera and multimedia-centric smartphone because.... the speaker aperture's in the wrong place seems to be completely and utterly bonkers.
For future designs, Nokia, we don't care if there's an 'unsightly' speaker grille on the side or top of the device. We simply want to hear the phone's output properly and not muffled by a factor of ten because we're "placing it wrong".
Most, if not all, designs since the N8 have had a speaker aperture which is less easily blocked. Even the 808, which follows the N8 form factor fairly faithfully, uses a convex camera island such that the speaker slot is rarely blocked by anything. Happily!
It's also worth noting that the latest Nokia Lumias have a fairly loud speaker with sound output that's hard to block in normal use, so definitely a lesson learned here.
3. Fixed batteries. One attribute that both the N8 and E7 share is a fixed battery, i.e. one that's mounted internally and which users aren't expected to ever access. The concept behind this is that the body of the phone can be made thinner, relative to the overall form factor, because a unibody construction can be employed, with no strength-reducing battery door/catches needed. Again it's a perfectly reasonable design decision but again I'm tempted to say it's not actually the right decision....
For their 2011 designs, Nokia should resist the temptation to go 'sealed' again. Nokia makes some spectacularly good batteries (e.g. BP-4L), so why not design more of their models around these? When the iPhone 4 owner next to you on the train on the way home runs out of power at the same time as you, you'll then still be able to calmly reach into your pocket for your charged spare - and then be good to go for another 24 hours or more.
Sealed/internal/'embedded' batteries should be reserved for niche phones where style and strength is at an absolute premium.
In fact, I've gone into a lot more depth on this subject - it does seem as if Nokia trying to keep replaceable batteries as much as possible (think Nokia 808, E6, 603, 701, 700, Lumia 710, 820, and so on, and, as I said, reserving sealed cells for when style and strength are absolutely necessary (as on the ill fated X7 and the current WP flagship Lumia 920).
4. microSD slots. It will seem at this point as if I'm picking on the Nokia E7 a lot, but I can't help that. There have been a few smartphone models from Nokia over the years which haven't had a memory card slot - the N95 8GB being the best known, but they're few and far between. And now we have the E7 coming with no memory card...
As with replaceable batteries, Nokia still produces more phones with microSD than without, so sealed memory, again, is kept for devices which are perceived to need to be seamless in their design. The E7 was a high profile 'sealed' failure (see, I was right all along), as was the X7 (ditto) and we've had the N9 and all the Windows Phone 7 Nokias coming without microSD (for platform limitation reasons), but on the other hand the Symbian flagships, the 808 and 701 both have expansion and are all the better for it.
5. Camera glass protection. Devices likes the N73 and N95 (and the legendary N82) pioneered the idea of a mechanical protector for the all important camera glass. Not only did it stop nasty, greasy fingerprints from accumulating and spoiling your snaps, there was the tremendous convenience of being able to open the slider to actually launch the camera application, so you were good to go in a second or two at most.
Sadly, this is one design feature which hasn't persisted at all. I understand the reason, too - having a protection mechanism would add at least 1mm, if not 2mm, to the thickness of the phone at that point. And 2mm is a lot in 2012. It's a trade off that I'd be happy with but many consumers wouldn't. Nokia's solution, for the 808 PureView, was to make the camera exterior out of Gorilla Glass, solving the problem of accidental scratches, and several other manufacturers (e.g. Apple) are going down the same line of thought for their latest models.
But, photo-geek that I am, I still want a proper mechanical barrier, to know that I've got pristine optics for that ad-hoc snap. The 808 doesn't need too much attention, but the Lumia 920's camera glass is quite appallingly vulnerable to fingerprints and I'm utterly fed up of having to wipe it before every single photo....
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A slightly better report card for hardware than for software, then. How do you think Nokia did and how well has it matched what you'd like from a late 2012 smartphone? It's fair to say that the company has had to maintain a tricky balancing act in terms of resources since February 2011 - I'd argue that the tricky situation was of its own making, but what's done is done and we're all having to live with the consequences and possibly adapt how we choose and use our smartphones in the very different tech landscape of 2013.
For me, the Nokia 808 PureView ticks so many of the above boxes (especially with some judicious add-on software) that it's hard to see past it in this 'winding down' phase in the Symbian world, but I'd love to know how well your needs are being met.
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