Function and purpose on cellphones

I don’t look down on older phones, you know for me it’s great to have many different cellphones around and have fun with them. Sometimes you pick up older clamshell phones, like the ones Jack Bauer and his enemies are keeping touch in earlier seasons. Sometimes you want to pick up a sturdier, a really rugged one (those used to be hard to find, Motorola has one or two such models, and they sure look like police-models.

But then always at the end you are using the business-phone to get all the emails in so why carry the two phones?

I’d like to have a clamshell with email and business capabilities.

Why clamshell? Because it’s dead-easy to put the keylock on since it's not anything you'd have to remember, just close it and that's it! Also you are not answering to any calls by a mistake because of the tight jeans you have. So just when you are about to sit down and someone calls you, your jeans are starting to press the answering-button, and so there you go, you are caught gossiping perhaps!

Well, you could always argue that there is a switch on many of the different phones that you can press and then you’d have the keylock on, but still even today, I end up getting answers to my calls by accident, people being not aware that the phone in their purse or jeans-pocket is answering the call!

When the clamshell-form is further studied I find that having buttons outside the closed phone is usually messy. If you have buttons outside, make sure they wouldn't be harmful in terms of usability and/or they'd need to be pressed hard in order for them to be effective. Motorola Razr is pretty ok since the camera button needs a quite heavy push in order to function, so you won't end up having totally dark photos from your pocket, wheareas for example the Nokia 6126 is horrible in this respect. You end up putting it into your pocket eventually. (It hasn't got the automatic keylock when folded, couldn't find it even from the settings.) So what happens is not just that accidentally the side-button for the camera is being pressed down several times and you end up having black photos, but the real deal is the power button! You start to wonder that the phone is not buzzing at all for a while, since you've turned it off accidentally!

How an earth you're designing a phone that has the power-button on the side like this: (see from the side the red dot, that's the power button). Nokia design-engineering at it's best on this one for sure :)

With the Motorola Razr you can read email pretty easily (although it is painfully slow to write long texts since the operating system slows down significantly), and switch it to check the emails in different time-intervals. That’s pretty good since with low-end Series 40 Nokias have a separate program that handles emails and there is no possibility of “autocheck emails in 10-minute intervals”, or such. So in ads they claim they have the email on those phones, and that’s a load of bs, since it’s not even work properly, it doesn’t have an unauthorized certification pass, etc. Series 60 (as they say; smartphone) however has all the nice functions, but the problem is that you have to constantly take the battery out of the phone if you are using other than the normal phone / sms -functions. (Crashes)

Has Nokia become the new Microsoft?

Nokia E90-comments & S60-comments

(With these functional changes, the world would have the best phone in terms of productivity. Also the stability would be the next concern...)

Messages

When a text-message (SMS) comes in, there is no cursor, with which you could copy text to be pasted on a calendar or for other text-documents. In order to do that, you’d have to press forward and then mark the text and close/delete the message and paste it where ever needed. However, you can’t copy a phone-number to be pasted somewhere that you could make a phone-call into that number. You can’t paste it into the main menu, where you could make the phone-call. However you can paste it into the phonebook, but the green button doesn’t allow you to call on that number.

When viewing a message, you can’t “select all” text and copy it to be pasted somewhere else from the clipboard. When you press “forward”, you can start marking the text with the cursor, but even there is no “select all” function.

There is no insert -function on the messages, there is only “Insert template”. So you can’t insert a number of a person from the contacts when writing a message. You’d have to go to the contacts and edit the contact, then copy the email or phone-number (mark + copy) and close it and go back to the message you were writing to paste it. Send business card is a different thing since when writing a message, you want to keep all the things in a one message, they can’t be scattered, especially when there are people who receive hundreds of messages per day, and tracking back is very difficult. Send business card function doesn’t have any message section where you could write some other info, so insert function when writing a message would be best. (However insert function is being used on lower-end Nokia phones.)

No menu that would have print, send, etc. So when an email or sms comes in, you can’t print it, or forward it for example via Bluetooth. In case you want to forward an sms via mail, you can’t write an email-address on the number field so that it’d send the message as an email, or the other way around. You’d have to mark the content of the message (remember, there is no “select all”) and then discard the message and create a new message and paste the clipboard there.

Contacts

You can’t copy the details, such as email-addresses, or phone-numbers easily. You’d have to open the contact, in other words edit the details in order to copy (mark text / numbers, anc ctrl+c copy) something easily to be pasted into calendar or into a text document.

Telephone

When you want to call in a certain day to a number, that you don’t want to save into your contacts, you’ve saved the number into your calendar. When copying that number from the calendar by opening the “event”, you can’t paste it so that you could make a phone call! You can paste it into the contacts (search-function), but you can’t make a phone call with the number by pressing the green button to make the call. It doesn’t help if you go to the main menu and try to paste (CTRL+V) it there either, you just have to memorize the number, or write it down and click them numbers on the main menu, provided if you don’t want to save the number into your contacts.

Calendar

You can’t copy calendar-events: CTRL+C and then paste it with CTRL+V on another day. The function is not even available on a menu / selections.

This is a major thing lacking since there are many same-named-events scattered around the calendar with different dates.

There is a market for a different kind of business phone

It’s really surprising to see that the current mobile phone industry with their so called “smart phones” haven't got the basic issues concerning usability and productivity cornered. Sure they give you specs; you have GPS, WLAN, EMAIL, whatever, but try to use the web-browsing with your email online in the background and receive calls and answer sms-messages every now and then (you can’t really control when people call or sms you, you know…) on your…mmm., let’s say Nokia N95. You’ll find that either you desperately want a simpler phone that you can rely on having phone calls and sms-messages, or you have to carry two phones with you.

So then you’ll have Windows Mobile. The largest audience use PCs, but then again Windows Mobile really doesn’t work the way PCs work; like where is the copy/paste on the WM-phones that haven't got the touch-screen? On Windows Mobile 5.0 you'd have to download Scissors in order to copy/paste text. (You'd have to pay for it after the trial period and it's constantly reminding you for that no matter what you do, so I tried uninstalling after that..) Press shift, move backwards on the text so you’ll mark the text, like on a PC. Then there should be copy to clipboard, like on a PC. Thus you’d be able to paste the selected and copied text into your calendar, or, sms, or email, whatever. At least on the Windows Mobile 5.0 I can’t seem to find copy/paste functions even on the menu. Nokia S60 has this function and it works just fine. But there are other issues to be discussed later on. For example copying a number from an sms, or email; where is the cursor to start marking the text with shift to be copy/pasted on both of these systems? You need to forward the email or sms first in order to get the cursor there with the text. The same is with the Windows Mobile. I just can’t believe this. (Later note in 2009: On Series 60, i.e. Nokia, if you have the Mail for Exchange installed, the forward trick doesn't work anymore since the forwarded text is totally un-editable!!)

Another issue about the Windows Mobile. You’ll see a bunch of emails on the list, never mind when you don’t have the nice Blackberry-trackball to browse the emails (Is this some very expensive patent issue, like why an earth there isn't another phone brand that would integrate the trackball?), but you can’t even select the spam-emails or unwanted emails by selecting them one by one on the list for example to be deleted! Nokia S60 is here once again a bit better, since you can select emails, notes, etc. by keeping the shift on when pressing the center-button. But even the Nokia Series 60 doesn't have a "select all" function in the operating system.

Let’s say you have an invitation on the email, you’d want to copy the address and paste it into your calendar-event; notes section. You’d have to first forward the email, then copy the text, then go to the calendar to get it pasted there – and this works only with Nokia S60 phones, so not Windows Mobile phones since you can’t copy/paste anything!

Back in the days Nokia used to have the cursor on the Nokia 9300i for example. You got an email or sms in, so immediately then you were able to copy/paste the text where ever you wanted! Imagine this productivity, the damn machine worked like a normal PC; even copy was CTRL+C and paste was CTRL+V!! There was also a menu that had printing, sending with Bluetooth etc. things available. Select all was no other than the usual CTRL+A. Even you could switch programs running (task manager) with the (was it ctrl+tab) PC-type of a function.

Imagine the productivity once again; you are writing something and there is an sms coming in, you review it, copy some things from it and then switch back to the message writing window and paste it there just like on a normal PC…

That used to be like that before Nokia changed everything on those hard-core business-phones. These new Nokias don’t even hold their operating system together, let alone handle emails properly. There is no automatic mail-check if the machine goes offline for a while because of a bad reception. (Later note in 2009: Mail for Exchange is very good on this, but the OS still lags the edit-cursor on incoming emails/sms, etc.) You were used to be able to start a new email or go somewhere else when you were actually sending an email or an sms, like right after you pressed “send”. You were able to go and view emails or continue another mail on another window…not anymore. This very critical list for a business-user follows on the next post.

Easy-to-use one purpose machine

I envisioned back in the late 90’s this highly stable and reliable easy-to-use one purpose machine that would handle mobile email; reading and replying; just text. There weren’t any. And I’m quite sure there isn’t even now any such machine. Blackberry might be very close to something like that, but there is also so much annoyance into the whole experience. I mean when you have a possibility of taking a picture and you want to send that picture via Bluetooth to your friend’s phone right on the spot, and your friend doesn't have a Blackberry-phone... Then there would be this annoying hassle and nothing would really work when the technology in the first place is not really intuitive enough for users.

Apple has been quite intuitive with the iPhone for sure, but then again to get the iPhone for a business-use, forget about it. You can’t copy/paste text or phone-numbers or you cannot copy even other files for that matter? There is no proper contacts directory, no multi-receiver sms-messages, etc. Sure it’s a nice weekend phone and a portable wlan-gadget, but nothing more. Maybe soon things will be different.

People have been really into mobile emailing with a qwerty-keyboard lately. First there were these Palm Pilot PDAs and such variants. Palm went mobile, Treo came out on the market. (Treo 750, image left) Palm didn’t really change anything on their operating system. Then came Blackberry and now they are all over the place. Even though Palm OS is a system you can really rely on, people go for “in/hip/cool” things. I admit, the Palm is quite outdated in looks when you compare it to the BB 8800 or Pearl for example, but then again it’s hard to compare them since the other system has a touch-screen and the other doesn’t. BB is more for emailing, but nothing else really. Maybe it's just that I love the Palm operating system in it's reability and, oh, well...the OS looks like an old Mac!

I’m a cellphone-freak, no doubt about it.

I’m a cellphone-freak, no doubt about it but I’m also a travelling businessman, and I’m using phones a lot. I can buy 5-6 cellphones a year and still want one or two more. I’ve had them in all sizes and for all purposes. Emailing and instant messaging is a very crucial part of the whole thing. The second thing is managing the information flow. Usually that takes two cellphones, whereas the one is purely for calling, and the other one is dedicated for emailing and calendar-issues.

I really hate that even though we’ve been mobile for the past decade or so in terms of text messaging, we are still lacking a proper business-tool that would be reliable and intuitive enough.

(As a comment made later 2009: It's funny to see people carrying their Blackberrys and iPhones at the same time. The other is for corporate emails and stuff obviously, and then the other is for your, eh, life..the phone you want to use the most. Apple is dying to get into the corporate action with the VPNs and Mail for Exchange that they already have, etc., but personally I think they still have to integrate a proper keyboard for the iPhone. Then, and only then it's set to fly high. So Steve, couldn't you have another version perhaps with a physical keyboard as well?)