I recently spent a little over a week with the Apple iPhone. I can’t say it was the best experience of my life, but I most certainly did notice several things that Nokia should take notes on, and several other things that Apple needs to learn from Nokia. You won’t find an iPhone review here on Symbian-Guru. It’s out of context. If you’re wanting a review, check out this one at MobileBurn.com. Instead I think it’s important to pick out things that I think Nokia could learn from Apple, and later, things that I think Apple needs to pick up from Nokia.
There’s several things that the iPhone simply does exponentially better than Nokia’s S60 products do. These are listed in no particular order…
1. Email Setup – When I connected my iPhone to my computer running iTunes, it automatically checked Outlook, found that I have 4 email inboxes setup, and pulled all of the necessary settings, other than the passwords, for these accounts. That means all I had to do was go into the Mail application and add passwords. That’s it. What’s silly is that Nokia’s PC Suite supports email syncing with SOME phones, and even then, it doesn’t pull all your mailbox settings, just your actual emails. Apple has the clear advantage with this, I’ve NEVER seen such an easy and convenient way to get email setup on my handset.
2. The iPhone comes with a dock. Seriously, every Nseries should, too. Doesn’t need to be anything fancy. Just a little stand that will sync/charge my handset, and simple enough that I simply need to drop the phone onto it. All this really does is encourage users to connect their handset with their PC, which is something I think Nokia wants to do, anyways.
3. The whole repositories thing. The Internet Tablets have this, but they’re still a bit difficult. With the Installer app on the iPhone, literally all you need is a URL. Type that in and you automagically get a huge list of freeware to install. What’s even better, when an app gets updated, your Installer app tells you. To update, merely get in there and click ‘Update’. That’s it. And the Installer app comes with several well-stocked repositories already populated. I realize you can’t build this functionality into S60, but we desperately need something like that that makes it dead easy for users to get 3rd party apps. The current S60 method (having them scattered all over the internet and relying on bloggers to pass the word) SUCKS. I don’t care if a 3rd party entity develops an app that copies this functionality, but we need it badly.
4. Automatic Access Point Switching. I never ONCE saw anything about Access Points on the iPhone, and I shouldn’t see it on any other phone. ‘Dumbphones’ don’t bother the user about what access point to use, why does S60? With the iPhone, I told it what WiFi network it was allowed on, and it would seamlessly switch back and forth between EDGE and WiFi. When I went to the grocery store, it would switch to use EDGE to check my email. When I got back to the apartment, it was automatically back on WiFi. I never once told it to do that. It also REALLY bothers me that S60 asks if I want to use the AT&T MMS access point (I noticed it in the UK on T-Mobile, too). Of COURSE I don’t. I only want to use that for – MMS. Silly phone.
5. PC Connectivity – When you turn on the iPhone, the first thing it tells you to do is connect it to iTunes. Granted, this is so that you can ‘activate’ it (which is a load of horsecrap, but that’s for another post), but it immediately informs users that they can connect their phone to their computer for an enhanced experience. I like this. First, however, Nokia needs to develop a PC Suite for Macs (and obviously rename it).
So that’s it. After a little over a week with the iPhone, these are the things that I felt Nokia needs to take notice of, and quickly. The biggest one, I’d say, is the repositories. The process of finding applications, getting them installed, and then keeping up with updates needs to be DRASTICALLY rethought and re-assessed.
