A day with a Nokia 5800

I have always been a fan of Symbian, right back to the days of Psion, and regularly use and recommend the Nokia E71 as a good business phone. So yesterday I decided to give up my beloved iPhone for the day and try a Nokia 5800 just to see how S60 fifth edition was for day to day use and to see if some of the naysayers had a point. What a shock! I have updated the device with the latest firmware, which is a huge improvement on the rather dodgy builds that came before, but it still has a few things lacking. The first thing I noticed was that although the version 40 firmware gives you kenetic scrolling, it’s not implemented throughout the interface. Sometimes you can flick scroll and other times it just refuses to work, however when it doesn’t work you inadvertently launch an application instead because it interprets your touch as a double tap. It’s very frustrating. Speaking of this double tapping business, it’s just another problem in itself.  You can tap once to select, and again to action, which is completely fine, but again it’s not consistent throughout. It’s a bit like explaining single and double mouse clicks to a novice PC user, there is a method and reason there, but I’m dammed if I can see it!

So, not off to a good start, and it just gets worse!The Ovi store looks like it was thrown together in a few days, possibly by a toddler, and I always got the feeling it was going to crash at any moment. It actually did, once or twice. The design of the entire thing is terrible, with tiny little icons that are a struggle to touch with a finger. The choice of applications was pretty dire, too, though in comparison to an iPhone this is always going to be a weakness. Back on the phone several times applications just gave up and exited, returning me to the home screen. However, even the crashing on this phone is inconsistent, as the next time I used them they would run perfectly! Remember, this is a device with supposedly stable firmware and I was only running the supplied applications.

Typing on the on-screen keyboard was sort of okay, but not a patch on the iPhone, and the whole experience felt a bit cramped. A resistive screen rules out any sort of multitouch abilities, so browsing the web and pictures is not an enjoyable experience. One strange thing is that the picture browser looks for any picture file on the device, so you get album art and backgrounds mixed in with your actual pictures,  which is very odd.

As a phone the thing works well, and it gets a far better signal than any other of my devices and therefore the call quality is excellent. The camera takes pretty good pictures and the free Ovi Maps application is almost a reason to buy the phone on its own. Sold with UK maps pre-loaded and given to a user who is not very demanding (surely the majority of people who buy this) and free on contract, I can see why the device has sold millions. It will do most things an Android or iPhone can do, and at a much cheaper price, it’s just the experience that is not as pleasurable.

For me though, it was a thoroughly frustrating experience and I can only conclude that S60 does not make the jump to touch very well. I have tried a few other fifth edition phones, and they seem to suffer from the same (but not quite as bad) problems. The older S60 third edition is still a good phone OS; on non-touch screens the interface makes sense, and I stick by my recommendations for the E71 and such devices. For touch, however, the current form of S60 just doesn’t cut it.

I’ve seen several Symbian advocates online recently, picking on Palm and almost laughing at how badly the Pre is doing and predicting the death of the company. Well based on my experience, WebOs and the Pre is a hundred times better than S60 touch and unless Nokia make a radical change, in a few years time we could be laughing at them.