Well, I admit, I have been late with my E66 coverage, due to technical difficulties, but that doesn’t mean that I have forgotten about you, dear readers. Today I come back with some nice material which I hope you will like. You have all heard about the new software improvements that have been brought to the new Eseries UI and I know you all want to see how these work. They say pictures are worth a thousand words, so I hope videos are worth a million. Using Mobiola’s Remote Phone Control (which you can check out and buy at the Symbian-Guru Software store), I have recorded on-screen videos of the E66’s UI improvements. Here is the first one: it’s the new calendar layout.
The basic functionality hasn’t been modified, but the calendar has become much more usable and friendly. Instead of scrolling and clicking and scrolling, everything now makes more use of the screen and you will find it all in one compact form, something we have been shouting out to Nokia and S60 for years. Nokia has taken notes from a very prominent calendar application, Handy Calendar, and has implemented the same layout. Instead of a huge month view, you can now see the month calendar as well as each day’s tasks on the same screen. Days with a task are marked by a triangle, and those with birthdays have an exclamation mark.
Different views (Month, Week, Day, To-Do) have been nicely organized in the Options/Change View menu, as opposed to the current clutter with them all being put in Options. Day View can also be accessed by pressing a selected day, Week View by selecting a week number.
Making a new entry is now much more eye-friendly with all the information in one screen. Text has been replaced by icons, and I am a bit worried about first time users figuring out these are start and end times and dates. But I guess the icons aren’t that hard to recognize. A new possibility is now being able to set a meeting as an All Day Event, as well as the simplicity of adding Details as opposed to the current Options/Add Description/New when entering a new item. One setback is that you can no longer set the exact alarm date that you wish for, but have to choose between some preset time intervals before the event. I suppose this isn’t much of a deal, unless you are quite picky and like the alarm to ring 3 days 6 hours and 47 minutes before an event for example!
The remaining settings and other functionalities have been kept the same. So let’s cut to the chase and show you the walkthrough video.
Well this it for today’s video, make sure you check out Symbian-Guru tomorrow for a detailed view of the new Dictionary.
