Nokia E60
I promise something that wasn’t to do with bike riding, so here it is (took me long enough). Recently my old mobile phone started playing up. The replacement phone I chose was the Nokia E60 so here’s the verdict.
I’ve never really been a fan of Nokia phones, though I was more or less sold by the features. A phone that supports WiFi (802.11g even) sounded quite useful. It certainly has its uses; this includes checking my emails in the morning without having to wait for my laptop to wake from sleep and I have been able to use it for net access from some open wireless access points. Overall, however, I would say I haven’t been wooed by Nokia from this phone.
First of all, it’s not quite like my old Siemens ME45. That phone fits snug in your hand, feels very solid and you couldn’t wish for it any smaller. My only regret with this old phone was that it had a monochrome screen when colour ones were just coming out and the lack of bluetooth. I’m sure there were things I was disappointed about though after the years I’ve forgotten what they would have been (at 3.5 years, it lasted very well).
Now compare this to the Nokia E60, width and length, it’s not much larger than my old phone though the old phone has curved sides which seems to make a fair difference. I could fit the old phone in my pocket along with my ipod a lot easier. Though on the positive side it’s thinner so it’s less visible through my pockets if I’m wearing jeans and I don’t have my ipod. It’s not as comfortable to hold and it hasn’t got the same shock-resistant design though fortunately I haven’t dropped it yet.
More on the positive side, Bluetooth syncability has been a great addition. While my old phone could be synced over IrDA and rs232, this became obsolete when my new laptop didn’t have either. And while I used to to back up contacts, the calendar only had miniscule storage capacity so I didn’t use it. Being able to sync it with iCal on my mac has been a great enhancement, not only for appointments and meetings, though to-do items as well. This probably justifies the new phone, though it could have been achieved with any bluetooth phone. It didn’t have to be a Nokia or WiFi capable.
The negatives would have to include user interface design. Many people rant and rave about how user friendly Nokia phones are, though I’m now suspecting that this is nothing but a myth (it’s possibly that most of these people are just the long time Nokia users). Now while the interface hasn’t been impossible to figure out (probably only because I’m tech savvy), however it has been far from logical. For example, I spent ages trying to figure out how to get the in-call timer showing (i.e. the thing that shows the duration of the call as you speak). Anyone would swear that the setting for this should be found in the main Settings menu, however, it was buried away in a settings menu in the part where you actually go to view recent call times, etc.
Another downside is that it didn’t ship with a stopwatch or a countdown timer. You’d think that such a sophisticated phone would have such a basic and trivial feature, but no. Not to worry, there are some third party programs for this though, some that cost an arm and a leg if you want the Symbian polished looking native version. Though if you search a bit further you’ll find some free J2ME ones that are a bit trickier to figure out, but appear to do the job.
Another let down is that although the phone supports VoIP calls over WiFi using SIP, it doesn’t cope with NAT traversal at all and I’ve yet to get my local asterisk setup going properly yet. Another funny thing is with task management, unless you quit an application it continues to run though if another app needs memory and there isn’t any free, then an app in the background may get closed. Yet there isn’t actually any way to see which apps are currently open. I guess it’s not such a huge problems but that’s probably one of the things that differentiates Symbian from a real operating system. In any case, I suppose it’s not a PDA after all though.
While there are probably other issues, that is probably enough to detail for now. I’m sure I can make do with this phone for now. Though the question is, will it last another 3.5 years like the old one?