The E65 will be sorely missed by this blogger. More and more, I’m finding things on this E-series that make me wonder why they haven’t made it to the N-series. I know that Nokia is a massive company, but there’s still no real reason that these two teams can’t talk. I for one am hoping that as part of the massive reorganization, Nokia sits these two groups down together and makes them have a big pow-wow. But in the meantime, I’ll give you my list…
1. Access Point Groups – This is the single most necessary built-in
feature for any WiFi-enabled phone. For those that aren’t privy to this
wonder, Access Point Groups allows you to choose the access points you
want your phone to use, and put them in the order that you want it to
search for them. For instance, I have my MEdiaNet, home WiFi, and
Christina’s WiFi networks that I use. With Access Point Groups, I can
create a group called "Use This" and default all my apps to it. This
group will tell the device to first check to see if my home WiFi is
available, and if it’s not, move on to Christina’s WiFi. If that’s not
there either, then use the MEdiaNet access point. All without me
telling repeatedly. This is brilliant. Why this isn’t on N-series, I
don’t know.
2. The aforementioned Download! App . This is, again, brilliant.
3. Build quality. Seriously, it’s amazing to me that 2 phones from the
same company can have such a difference. This one is known well in the
blogosphere.
4. RAM Usage. This needs to be really studied. My N95 has 20MB of free
RAM, about the same as my E65 does. On the E65, I can run that down to
~3MB before I start losing apps. Believe it or not, I’ve had TalkPlus,
Jaiku, Log, Contacts, Messages, and the Web Browser open without
breaking a sweat. It’s unreal. Where is this kind of memory management
on the N-series? Both my N73 and N95 had roughly the same free RAM and
couldn’t run nearly the same number of apps.
But let’s not forget, this is a two-way conversation, so what is it that the N-series guys need to share with their more business-like brethren?
1. Lifeblog – businesspeople are bloggers too, and there’s no reason that they shouldn’t have the application as well. To say it’s built-in is BS, cause I remember when I could install it on my phone. To say it has to do with the cameras and the fact that the N-series is multimedia. Again, not true, as the E65 has the same camera as the N76. So let’s open things up a bit, shall we?
2. N-series, let’s share the multimedia key. The "Own Key" on the E-series is a joke.
I want to say that it’s still ok to maintain software differences. Despite the tirades of others, I don’t personally have a big problem with maintaining some differences. The doc editors, the BlackBerry and Exchange suites, go for it. I mean, you have to maintain some difference.
But regarding these small usability features, let’s all just remember our childhood and share.
