Ewan turns his critical eye over the Office apps in the 9500, namely the Word Processor, Spreadsheet and Calendar applications in Part Three of our 9500 Review. If you were looking for seamless integration with your laptop carrying friends, you might be in for a shock.
Nokia 9500 Review (Part Three)
Again, an excellent review.
I can't understand Nokia's rationale in removing features such as Spell Checking and not improving aspects such as filters. This is a machine with so much potential, so why make the effort to ensure it doesn't reach it?
I fully agree with your point on the calander - my Series5 had the best calender ever (even better than my 9210).
> I can't understand Nokia's rationale in removing features such as Spell Checking > and not improving aspects such as filters. This is a machine with so much
> potential, so why make the effort to ensure it doesn't reach it?
Most likely due to software licensing costs (the dictionary was licensed from a 3rd party). Every $ helps Nokia's profit, and it was probably seen as an easy win...
Short term profit over long term usefullness of the device? I wish companies would look a little bit long term and brand building.
Thanks for bringing up a number of salient points of critique.
Ewan wrote:Short term profit over long term usefullness of the device? I wish companies would look a little bit long term and brand building.
I totally agree with you. Unfortunately, there have been too many of these recently in Nokia's case. Unchecked, they will erode the brand.
And really, I think the issues with file format conversion will have a significant impact on sales. Ultimately the word will be out that the 9500/9300 cannot read MS Office attachments less so edit them without formatting issues. This is not good for Nokia. And it's not good for Symbian. Those that have claimed ever since the Psion era that Symbian is not for the enterprise will be fuelled with more arguments. And Nokia's confusing naming is really irritating and goofy.
In Word: [Epoc/app] means [Symbian Word]
In Sheet: [Epoc/app] means [Symbian Sheet]
In Image: [Epoc/image] means [Mbm]
I'm only satisfied that the native formats seem to work cross all platforms. I have moved native word and sheet files between:
- Series 80 (9210)
- Series 80 v1 (WINS for 9210)
- Series 80 v2 (WINS for 9500)
- Series 90 v2 (WINS for 7700/7710)
and it seems to work problem free.
However, to Nokia's defence, there might be a contractual explanation for the lack of Spell/Thesaurus. If I recall correctly, the Spell/Thesaurus application was originally developed by Psion Software for the Symbian OS v3 version of Series 5. It was based on a component licenced from Lernout&Hauspie. This contract was later transferred to Symbian along with the other Psion Software assets, and the application became part of Symbian Office a la Nokia 9210.
Since then a number of things have happened. L&H has undergone some turbulent times and the founders have been in and out of jail. Effectively L&H does not exist anymore and its assets have been acquired by other companies.
Perhaps also the original L&H-Psion contract had a validity of 5 years. If it was signed in 1997, the contract period would have ended in 2002, i.e. sufficient to cover the Nokia 9200 series communicators, but now lapsed without any renewal possible.
Just a theory of course, but I think quite a probable one.
Furthermore, the reason why Symbian itself has been unwilling to contract a L&H replacement is that Symbian's current strategy is to leave all 3rd party contracting to the licencees. This includes applications for text entry, browsers, viewers etc and now also spell checkers & thesauri.
So it might not be intentional 'dumbing down'. However, it should be clear to Nokia and Symbian that this is an essential feature in the Symbian Office suite. If Nokia and Symbian wish to convince in the enterprise market space a replacement for L&H is essential.
For OPL developers, this probably also means that any applications which make use of the Spell.opx unfortunately cannot be ported to the 9500/9300 unless one is prepared to develop one's own Spell/Thesaurus... Do it, and you might get a fat licence deal from Nokia....
Or Nokia could have just licened LittleSense...