Steve's been running in depth tests on the multimedia performance of the Nokia N70 and N90, in comparison to the Windows Mobile-powered competition. Here's the group review. Summary: a surprising walk in the park for Nokia's N series stars.
Read on in the full article.
is a text editor built into the phone. a simple text editor with a search facility. notepad doesn't cut it. i've tried yedit but its very slow.
i use a palm and have 1500 memos in the memo application. these cannot be transferred to the notepad application as there is no search facility in the notes application. it also sorts them in chronological order rather than alphabetical. has that changed since my nokia 3650?
i'm looking at getting a 3230 but it was so close to been a very good phone. why can't a phone which advertises itself as an mp3 player only do mono?
thats the bad, now the good.
nokia battery life, runs on a sniff of electricity, thank you very very much. my palms after an hour or two of use are gasping.
robust hardware, i've dropped and abused my 3650 and it keeps going, my last 2 palms have hardware problems, the tungsten e arrived with hardware problems. nokia seem to make the effort to build good hardware.
A built-in good text editor would be nice, but in the meanwhile I'm satisfied with YEdit: http://www.yellowcomputing.de/?site=software&sid=YEdit__29&lang=en
To be fair to all concerned, this sort of problem appears whenever someone gets really attached to a aplatform - e.g. the number of people coming to me with huge, heavily-customised Psion Data files that they don't know what to do with.
S60 Notes syncs well to Outlook Notes, but as you say, for large numbers of notes/memos, the chronological sorting would be a pain.
Another solution is to re-create your memo set as a hierarchical set of plain text files (.TXT), then browse and view them using FExplorer's built-in text viewer.
Ideally, Nokia would pull their finger out and put in proper category support into To-do and Notes!
Steve
Yes entrenchement in anothe platform is a problem for swicthers. If Nokia did as Steve suggested I'd probably make much fuller use of To-do and Notes. Search would a greta feature too. I think a global search across Contacts / Calendar / Notes etc should be built into the platform.
And, in the meanwhile, before global search gets built into the platform, you could use something like this app: http://www.sept-solutions.de/English/search.php
the problem isn't switching. i've switched from psion s3a to psion 5. from psion 5 to palm 3x (that was tough, but the databases i had came very well over to memo in palm, not as good mind you as the psion 5 able to read and write csv files which was pure genius) to palm iiic, m125, handspring neo, sharp zaurus 5500 (terrible at syncing and i ended up using contacts for storing my notes, still use it as i love the keyboard and os), palm tungsten e, palm zire 72. i've even looked at the pocket pcs that gather dust here in my office (laughably bad! yakumo gps, mio gps, xda, jasjar all junk as far as i can see).
swapping even between palms can be akward when you find software from one will not work on another. i miss the free game submarine that came with my iiix (sniff). many a happy hour lost to that app. one reason i swapped back to palm from the sharp zaurus was that i missed irogue on the palm and nethack on the zaurus while pretty did nothing for me.
symbian is a great platform with a fantastic heritage. the lack of a buit in search option for any of the applications beyond contacts is terrible. if the device is capable of storing data it should have a search option. Thank you for the reference to the global search application, i had never heard of it. will give it a go.
syncing with outlook is another thing. if i wanted to sync with outlook i'd use pocket pc. i do not use outlook because it is terrible (security wise at the very least). many of the nerds and techs out there who choose palm, symbian and other oses are not microsoft fans. i don't sync any data from my 3650 to my desktop. my palm is synced 2-3 times a day at home and work. the sync on the palm is very well done and symbian would do well to emulate it (hell even licence it and sync with the palm desktop). i often store tons of stuff on the palm and beam to the 3650 to read it. the 3650 battery life means i can read a book for the 1.5 hours it takes to get to work, use it during the day and then another 1.5 hours of reading and not think twice about the battery. try that with rechargeable palms and pocketpcs. my old palm 3x, m125 and handspring neo were as good but the race for features in the palm market means that no more alkaline powered devices are available.
sorry in advance if this comment is ranting and whinging but the symbian os is so close to been perfect and some tiny changes would make it so. nokia seems intent on adding hardware 'functionality' cameras, mp3 players and that is great but a good text editor (not a word processor) with a blue tooth keyboard and a good search application would create for many programmers, engineers, journalists and other professionals a superb device.
thanks for your time.
Erhm, I would just like to point out to the previous poster that the 3650 is an archaic device. It is probably the most 'primitive' Symbian phone ever made, with a ridiculous low amount of available RAM. Lots of things have changed since the 3650, not only hardware-wise, but UI/OS-wise. And other Symbian phones like S80, 90 and UIQ have those features you miss built-in.
S60 3rd Edition has definitely been through some major changes since v.1. The details of S60 3rd Edition can be download as a PDF from forum.nokia.com or S60.com.