Jani Anttonen

Now that Nokia says that it’s back to business, I’ve had lots of thoughts in my head about Nokia and smartphones in general. Nokia has announced many interesting products this year, and the N8 is on it’s verge to being brought to the hands of customers. All these new models seem to have very cool external design, simple but still very distinguishable from the competition. N8 and E7 really look like they could bring something new to the yard. They definitely look great in still pictures, both on and switched off.

But wait when they get demoed on hand. Stuttering animations in the UI, or the complete abundance of them when you most need them really gets to you if you need perfection from the user interface. Although the cover flow -interface in the music player in Symbian ^3 gives hope, your dreams get shattered when you return to the home screen. Why won’t the icons stay coloured when you lift your finger off them? It just seems logical that the phone would somehow indicate to me that the application I just clicked on is starting at all. With these transition effects I could see users trying to click on the icon for as many times as they can before the app starts. That’s just wrong. I got to admit that I’ve got to see the devices live yet, but I’ve searched my way through a lot of videos and reviews to back up my words.

I still understand the UI though. It’s very Nokia-like, and I wouldn’t have expected it to be anything else than that. Some modifications have been made, and the home screens look beautiful. Can you change the bottom bar colour? I’d hope for this to be a feature, haven’t read enough about the device yet. And yes, I know that Symbian has very good theming capabilities, so the UI is pretty much customizable all-round.

Ovi store is great. It needs development, as well need the app store and android marketplace. I don’t see why so many people are criticizing it. Symbian has been given praises before to be easy for developers to develop their applications in. If Nokia just had more popularity than of now, Ovi could really thrive.

The new models have much potential to open up some doors to Nokia for future products, and the sales combined with how well the reception is will surely tell more about their future. I have doubts that Nokia would ever screw up with their hardware, as they have years and years of experience in the field of mobile phones. In terms of software they still have many miles of development ahead of them. As of now, Symbian can’t compete fully with the likes of iOS or Android. Specially iOS has created a new group of products: it is both a dumbphone and a smartphone, at the same time. Symbian ^3 phones are smartphones, that do many things well. But I’m just not sure if Symbian ^3 does things well enough. That, only time can tell, with upcoming Meego and future Symbian updates.