First impressions after an hour or so. Installed on an IBM desktop with a dual-core Pentium 4 2.8GHz, 512MB RAM, Windows XP. Connected to an N95-1 using bluetooth.
- Hugely bloated, sluggish, buggy, apps are slow to launch.
- Apps look very well thought-out for non-techie users.
- NSeries Video Manager now lets you set "high" quality for an N95, but I haven't had time to find out what this is. Video Manager then stopped working properly and won't let me back into 'settings'.
- Nokia photos was incredibly slow to launch, presumably doing some kind of indexing. Looks perfect for non-techie users but bizarrely seems to have incorporated Lifeblog and has indexed all my text messages on a timeline. It's a shame that the 'post to web' option has a manual setup: I would have expected better integration with Ovi Share at least, and ideally Flickr too.
- Download looks very interesting. It seems to be a completely different entity from the on-board 'Download!' and installs a new client on the handset. This is just the kind of thing that's been talked about to persuade non-techie users to install 3rd party apps. However, it's extremely buggy still: even the elevator bar in the window packed-up at one point.
Onto the integrated suite itself...
- Limited sync options: Oulook, Outlook Express, or Lotus, basically. I use Thunderbird so no use to me.
- Music Manager looks OK. I haven't looked at it for a while. I'm a firm believer that you should find one method you like and stick to it; this would be fine for most users. I think they should re-consider their pop-up that encourages you to use eAAC+ format, though: they should point-out that uPNP streaming won't work with the software provided if you do this.
- As previously pointed-out, where TF is contacts manager?! You used to be able to key-in contacts on your PC, with all the benefits of a big screen and qwerty keyboard, then sync to the phone. This seems to have gone, so if you don't have the aforementioned sync options you have to key-in all your contacts with the keypad or bluetooth keyboard.
CONCLUSION: enables the none- and semi-technical user to do the things that the rest of us do using other apps. Bloated and buggy, though, and where is contacts manager? Needs more sync options, too.