It's part 4 of Ewan Spence's 'real world' test of the Nokia N97 at the Edinburgh Fringe and it's embedded below. In this (surprisingly gripping, considering the focus on PIM!) part, he looks at reactions to the N97 from the iPhone-loving community at the Fringe, he complains about Ovi Sync, rants about a UI fail in the N97's Contacts and rails again against missing category support in all the PIM application. He's a happy bunny really, honest.
Read on in the full article.
Ewan says of Nokia's attitude to the PIM apps, "we're going to ignore the basics and the gee-whizz is coming in 6 months"... I think this is a good summary of the overall stance with S60 today.
Glad I'm not the only one who is frustrated by lack of category support on every S60 device though!
Ewan you really made some good points...
I actually had the pleasure of using the N97 for a bit more than a week myself. As a long time symbian user who moved on to the G-whizz of the iPhone, the n97 was really hard to use at first. The screen was just awfull, almost illegible in the sunlight and useless without a stylus. Ironically, Samsung uses a capacitive touchscreen on their i8910. But apart from the screen, I really enjoyed the design. As far as I remember the n97 is probably the first N series device that really felt solid in the hand. Almost e71 kind of rock solid!
That's why I really wanted to like the n97 but with all the inconsistancies in the OS and with constant popups (some of which can't be disabled) I was glad to go back to the iPhone. Especially becuse there was no way of syncing ithe n97 with a mac, because Nokia failled to release the isync plugin on time. The same as they did, when the 5800 came out, but one could a least tweak an old s60v3 plugin to work with the 5800. On the n97 they decided to change something though, and not even the 5800's isync plugin is suitable for a workaround. This is so typical of Nokia!
In the end what I liked the most about the n97, was Nokia Messaging pushing my gmail and Gravity displaying the latest twitts on the standby screen. It's really a pitty that Nokia always falls short of realising it's potential to the max.
PS: Sorry for any typing errors, I wrote this on my iPhone without autocorrection (I'm not english and there's no Slovene autocorrection bulit in).
In all fairness to Ovi Sync, I have experienced roughly the same types of sync issues (duplicate contacts and events, all-day events turning into 0:00-23:59 events, etc. ) whether I was using Ovi Sync, ScheduleWorld, or MyFunambol. Which leads me to believe the issue is not with Ovi Sync (the web-based service), but rather with the SyncML phone software, especially in the case of S60 5th ed. devices.
Totally agree for the criticisms of the Nokia PIM - I moved from a Psion Revo to a 9300 and was disappointed to find that they had cut functionality. But when I bought an E71 last year I was really fed up with the bare bones diary, tasks and contacts system and bear in mind that the E71 is supposed to have enhanced funtionality in this area compared with the S60 standard. Just had a look at my 9300 and of course you can have colour coded categories in the Agenda and set multiple task categories... have templates in contacts (for the fields you use most, advanced search and do many other things that the E71 can't do. The comment about ignoring the basics and concentrating on future gee-whiz is well made - too much twittering and youtubing and not enough concentration on PDA functionality.
Funny how Steve hated on the M600 and P1 (excellent) "half qwerty" keyboards and now seems to love similar Nokia approach...
re. Nokia and the PIM apps, "we're going to ignore the basics and the gee-whizz is coming in 6 months"
Agreed this is a crazy strategy for Nokia to follow as the iPhone, for example, has pretty weak PIM apps so Nokia could easily improve on this but there is no way Nokia are currently going to beat the iPhone on 'gee-whizz'.