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.