Monthly Archives: December 2009

The first few minutes with a new smartphone can taint the user experience for much longer. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for smartphone manufacturers and operating system developers is to make you want to set it up immediately and to give you a buzz which makes you overlook the imperfections every phone will inevitably have.

It is amazing that in 2009 some manufacturers still don’t get it and still release phones which either require the user to do too much to set them up or which simply don’t work properly in specific areas. Ultimately the operating system is by far the most important aspect of the initial user experience, but poor hardware is easily capable of ruining the experience if it has a significant failure. Here are my impressions of how good each operating system is to use in the first few minutes-

Android- the new boy offers an exciting experience for the new users and is without doubt a pleasure to use and includes an interesting setup process. It is almost the perfect blend of automated setup alongside just enough interaction for the hardened smartphone user to get their teeth into. New smartphone users will probably not delve into the intricacies of the setup process and this is where it shines; it offers an experience which lets new users just pick it up and go and at the same time lets the geeks tweak as much as they want to. 9/10

BlackBerry- setting up BIS as a consumer is either straightforward or a bit of a fuddle. It tends to be a fuddle for me, but once it is up and running the rest of the process is fairly straightforward. The reliance on desktop synchronisation is a slight hindrance and it would be fair to say that excitement rarely invades the first few minutes with any BlackBerry device. BES users tend to have everything done for them. It is still my preferred platform for everything after, but the start could be better. 7/10

iPhone- easily the most intuitive to setup and you could find yourself with nothing to do after thirty minutes. The desktop synchronisation can be avoided using MS Exchange for your personal data, but iTunes will figure at some stage and the synchronisation process can be long winded and troublesome at times. It looks better than it performs. 8/10

Symbian- to this day Nokia has not managed to create a new user experience that doesn’t involve jumping through hoops on most models. Connectivity can be inconsistent, the built in email software can be unreliable and number of icons strewn over multiple pages is ridiculous. 3/10

Windows Mobile- surprisingly this is now one of the easiest to setup. HTC led the way with automated connection profiles and services like MS Exchange are very well supported. The experience afterwards is not always as clean, but the initial experience is very good indeed albeit without the flourish of excitement Android offers. 8/10

webOS- the way the operating system looks and works makes the initial experience feel quite friendly and natural. It can be flaky at times, but on the whole webOS is a pleasure to use and does make you want to get involved in as many areas as possible. 8/10

So, Android wins this battle. It is never easy to compare so many different systems, but on the whole they all work very well in the initial stages. Symbian has a long way to go to match the others and the network providers need to do more work in making BIS easy to set up for the consumer. It is getting better though and throughout the next year almost all smartphones should be as easy to setup as feature phones.