Ewan Spence is seriously impressed by his prototype of the upcoming Nokia E70 'gull winged' business smartphone. A full fold-over keyboard, high-res screen and Wi-Fi are going to make the E70 much anticipated.
Read on in the full article.
Gull Wings and Wi-Fi
I wanna see more screenshots of the UI in landscape mode!
Personally I dont like the more simplistic look of it. True, now more icons fit the screen, but the unique look and feel of series 60 is almost lost.
Big application icons at the top, no scroll bars,which take up unnecessary space, that were the most recognizable parts of s60 IMHO.
😞
I am curoius as to how easy it truly is to enter text with this keyboard design. Probably a question of personal taste....
Nice review, Ewan.
MarcTGFGunreg wrote:Big application icons at the top, no scroll bars,which take up unnecessary space, that were the most recognizable parts of s60 IMHO.
I'd say the big application icons on top (the whole top bar) from the older versions of S60 is the thing really taking up unnecessary space. With the much needed renewal of the messaging app, and all the other UI improvements, S60 might finally be at a stage where I'd consider using it again. Not the E70 though - because the screen size (physical) hasn't changed. But perhaps the E61.
There's no screenshots yet as being a 9.1 app we need to actually write a new application. No Ctrl-Fn-Shift-S here! We'll have a "Closer Look at the S60 UI" in January, along with more detail on the brower. At that point, you'll have screens a go go.
Raven, you are right about the big application icon, taking up space. But it also distinguihses the s60 UI from say Windows Mobile and almost all other proprietary UIs.
I'd say it simply looks good. Now it looks boring, very much like Windows Mobile. A convergance of sort, since WM added two softkeys at the buttom in its latest incarnation.
I also find it inconsistent to basically have two UIs in one device since the portrait and landscape UIs seem to differ substantially.
No application icon at all (!) in landscaPE mode, softkeys to the side instead of at the bottom, signal and battery strenght meters all over the place. 😞
I would prefer to have the softkeys alwoys athe bottom, even if it means to add two more of them hardwarewise.
btw. you could use http://www.sysopendigia.com/imageexpo for getting those v9.1 screenshots quickly and easily (or even an AVI video..)
Ewan,
Does this phone finally support direct synchronisation with an Exchange server via Activesync? There were press releases that Nokia had licensed the protocol, and this woulod appear on S60 phones. However I see no mention of Activesync among the email connectivity options...
Thanks.