7 months ago, I decided I really had to get a Windows Mobile device. Why? I needed medical software for my hospital trainings and S60 3rd offerings weren’t good enough. I was looking for a low-end device, but ended up getting a Qtek 9100, also known as iMate KJam or HTC Wizard. After having blissfully enjoyed S60 3rd for a year by then, I had to re-think everything I was accustomed to in order to work with a Windows Mobile 5 device. I enjoyed the ride at times, hated it at others. Hardware-wise, I loved the WiFi and the built-in Qwerty, hated the camera and the fragility. But it is in terms of software that I noticed the bigger differences.
Today, having spent 7 months so far with WM5 and 1 year and 7 months with S60 3rd, I can now tell the weakness and strength of each platform. That’s what I am bringing here. There are many aspects of both devices that I don’t use now, so don’t expect me to cover every single point of divergence between both. After the break you will find 10 points I think S60 3rd, and Nokia being the major supplier with devices running this OS, can learn and improve from WM.
Before I start, I will stress that these are my own impressions, and that I am mostly talking about S60 3rd (not FP1) and Windows Mobile 5 (not the newer WM6). So here they are: 10 improvements S60 needs to learn from WM.
1 – Use the screen estate better
You will probably agree that this is due to the lousy QVGA resolution. But even with QVGA, I can’t help but think that the screen estate can be used better, way better. Take for example the messaging, the settings, the gallery. Every option in the OS seems to have a huge icon, with a name next to it. Most of my screen space is blank.
2 – Customizable standby screen
Every single person who has used WM for a while can tell you just how versatile, how useful, how customizable is the Today screen (WM equivalent for standby screen). It’s not a matter of picking which shortcut icons are on display. It’s a matter of which modules or items are displayed. And the modules? They range from the silliest to the most useful: date and clock, calendar, notifications, user ID,… those are the silliest. The most useful? Well, it depends on your needs. Developers can create today plug-ins to applications. You can have a module for displaying shortcuts to your favorite software, another for activating connectivity (BT, IR, WiFi, 3G), another for showing the number of your unread feed items and even displaying some titles, and it goes on and on. Just take a look at the post Zach made comparing the S60 standby to the WM today. And that’s just scratching the surface. I have the most unclustered today screen ever, with only 2 raws: SPB Pocket Plus and SPB Mobile Shell and frankly, I can access everything, EVERY SINGLE THING, on my device using only those. I simply forgot how WM operates out-of-the-box. Quite impressive, ain’t it? I would like S60 to let developers access the standby screen. I’d like to be able to customize it to display what I want.
3 – Standardization
Every WM professional (touchscreen) device ships with each function in the same place. If I pick up my friend’s HTC Touch or my trainer’s HTC TyTn II or someone’s iMate Jasjar, and wanted to change the theme, activate bluetooth, launch Word, get Help, I know EXACTLY where to look. If I take my friend’s N73 or my other friend’s N76 or the other’s 6120, it will take me a while to find my way around the menu. Even out-of-the-box. If you owned 2 S60 devices, you’d know what I am talking about. For God’s sake, the N95 had 2 Media folders in different places! I beg you S60, stop the non-sense. Follow one configuration, and by one, I mean One, Une, Uno, Wahida, and if that’s not good enough, I can get you a translation in each language on earth. From my experience with devices so far, I think the Nokia 6120 has the best menu layout: it is the one that makes most sense except for the My Own folder that should be named Applications.
Talking about standardization, we need some standard menu heights in S60. The standby screen has one height, the menu another, applications another. It’s crazy!
4 – Automatic Access Point
Pretty simple. Once I connect over WiFi on WM5, it doesn’t ask me what access point i would like to use in every single connectivity demanding application, over and over and over and over… That’s not smartphone-like, that’s dumbphone. Just stick to the access point I am using. And if I am on wap, gprs, 3g, tell me there’s another viable option around, like WiFi.
5 – Get the connection from my computer
When I connect my WM device to a laptop or computer that has an on-going internet connection, the connection is routed to my device. And best of all, it doesn’t ask me questions, doesn’t need settings, it just works, out-of-the-box.
6 – Gimme shortcuts
On WM, when I press Options, I get a list of actions with one letter underlined (on qwerty based devices) or one number underlined (on 12key devices), pretty much like the menus in Microsoft Windows. If I press the underlined key, the device performs the action. No need to scroll up or down. Simple and efficient.
7 – Start on boot
In WM, like on the desktop, there’s a Startup folder where you can put shortcuts to all applications that you want to launch when the device boots. It’s splendid. I can choose which built-in apps don’t launch and which 3rd party software do. S60 needs to give the user the option to do that himself without having to rely on a developer’s generosity to implement it in the software.
8 – Contacts look-up improvement
It’s Adam from pocketnow who opened my eyes to this. Apparently when you start typing on a WM standby, it opens the contacts but looks them up in a T9 way. For example, if you type “2″ it will look for contacts with a name/family name with an a, b or c. If you type 23, it will look for those with da, db, dc, ea, eb, ec, fa, fb and fc. You get the picture. It works the same way as SkeyQuiKey. I would love to see it implemented in S60 itself.
9 – Tell me my free RAM
In WM, I have access to see my free RAM. Why don’t I on S60? This is a major performance booster. Plus I would love to see ALL my running software, and not just those that kindly appear when I press the menu button for a while. Like for example, why don’t the Log, Gallery, Music Player, Contacts, show in there as running, when they show up in any other task manager?
10 – Let me choose what folders load in Gallery
The picture viewer in WM functions the same way the file explorer does, which means it will only display the My Pictures folder, when it’s first opened, showing the pictures and videos captured by the built-in camera. But I can navigate through my real folders in order to see what images are kept in these. That’s the way it should be, I think, in S60. If not, let me pick some “banned” folders, which images are not displayed in the gallery.
Bonus – 11 – Profession-axed software
I have said it, over and over again. S60 needs to be recognized as a professional operating system. That would mean getting profession-axed software : engineering, medical, law, graphic design,… Just for example, there’s a mobile version of Autocad for WM, that’s the software engineers use. When profession-axed software are available for S60, it will get a wider adoption. Not having this acknowledgment now is, in my sincere point of view, the major thing holding S60 back. Many of you will probably disagree.
These are the 11 improvements I believe S60 could use in order to achieve better user experience. What do you think? Is there anything you’d like to add to the list, or retrieve? Do you believe any of those will ever make it to S60, and if so, do you believe it’s due in the near future? Or will my grandchildren one day come to me and say “look, granny, I can see my free RAM! I bet that’s something you couldn’t do!”. JK, you get the point.
