If you don’t have any experience with Windows Mobile, you probably haven’t gotten around WMExperts. The most remarkable feature of WMExperts are the writings of the chief editor: Dieter Bohn. He knows when to be funny, when to be smart and when to tickle your mind with the start of an idea and leaves you freely thinking about the end of it. Recently, he has participated in the Smartphone Round Robin where he and the editors of TreoCentral, CrackBerry and Phone different exchanged devices (HTC TyTn II, Treo 680, Blackberry 8310 and iPhone) for 3 consecutive rounds and learned to live with nothing but their new device and get the most out of it. While this is an enticing adventure and should give us an idea to implement in our Symbian / Nokia world, it is not the reason of this post. In his last post on the Blackberry 8310, Dieter concludes with this:
If you want a device that “just works,” then the BlackBerry 8310 is probably for you. But make sure that you want “just works” in both senses of the word “just.” As in
- just: without having to futz around too much with settings.
- just: without being able to futz around too much with settings.
The reason I prefer Windows Mobile to BlackBerry is that latter bit. As for the former, well, I think that WM is really close, just not quite there yet. [...] So, yes, the BlackBerry “just works.” That’s a great thing for people who don’t care about the 2nd definition of “just.”
Click on for my thoughts on the matter.
Reading this, I roamed back to my motherland, S60. In fact, S60 is much closer to Windows Mobile in terms of user experience than I thought it was: both do fit in the first definition of “just” but do not fit in the second. Yet there are some differences:
- S60 gives the power user the opportunity to tweak and improve, but it is still limited compared to WM. I will get to that point in more details in another post.
- Out of the box, S60 works “just” right and better than WM especially in terms of telephony and messaging, the basic features that the average Joe uses 99% of the time.
Having used both, I’m left to think: what makes S60 my number one choice and WM my second? Is it the fact that I have a longer history with S60 than WM? Is it that most of the time, for everyday usage, I prefer the device that “just” works more? Or is it the frustration I feel, when the WM platform abandons me in the middle of a tweak, that makes me head back to my Nokia every time? I sure can’t answer that, not now at least.
One other idea that occurred to me is that S60 has found a great compromise between both. I was never as sure as I am now about the policy and the core strategy behind it. The whole idea is to bring a platform to the masses that can be great for their usual activities but to also give the opportunity to those who want to customize to be able to do so. That’s why I believe S60 has done so great, market-share wise. And while I still doubt that it has reached the perfect balance between both, I can’t question a second the intention and the effort to bring it to that level. So the next time I wonder why a certain feature hasn’t been implemented in the platform, I’ll know that it is probably because 95% of the population wouldn’t need it and that having it there would complicate things a little for them.
Tell us, what do you think of that and of Dieter’s definition of “just”? And what made you come into S60 land, in the first place? Were you looking for a platform that “just” works (1st definition) and stumbled on its wonders later OR for a device that doesn’t “just” work (2nd definition) and discovered its ease of use later?
