Two weeks have passed by since I told you that I was going to be dumping my laptop and going for the E90 instead. Now that it’s over, I think that I jumped ship a bit too early. There were certain measures I should’ve taken to make the experience a bit easier. But let’s cut the talk and start with the difficulties I faced during these 2 weeks when it comes to perofming my usual computer-related activities.
Connectivity: In no 3G land (ie my whole country), there were moments when a laptop is more than just welcome. Besides WiFi which the E90 has, the laptop also offers LAN connectivity and the outdated, but useful, dial-up connection. Being that ADSL was installed a bit late at my aunt’s house where I was staying 80% of the time, I was confined to dial-up and there was no easy way to use it on the E90. Hence, I had to resort to the laptop. In countries where 3G is ubiquitous, this might not be a problem.
Storage: the E90 that I had came with a 512MB microSD, which made me scream WTF? I still haven’t purchased the 8GBG microSD, so I had to resort to using one of the 2GB cards laying around. In all cases, even 8GB isn’t enough when it comes to replacing a full laptop. Online storage is a solution with services like Files on Ovi facilitating the process. But this brings us back to the first limitation: connectivity. You’d have to be online to access your files.
Browsing and Downloading: aw to the S60 browser! It’s true that I sometimes praise it, but during these 2 weeks I learned that it lacks many of the things I take for granted on Firefox, or even on Internet Explorer. Copying text from a webpage is impossible, right clicking on a link and saving it is as far as jupiter, tabbed browsing is doable but nor easy nor practical, and the most basic copying of the current page’s address is nowhere to be found. I also missed Fireftp, a Firefox extension I use to upload files for blogging purposes. Another huge bummer is the limitation over file downloading, which is nearly useless for files that aren’t recognized by default by S60. Hence, I couldn’t get rar files, whereas zips and .sis were sometimes handled in the weirdest way (opening in quick office at times, WTF?!). There is a workaround for this, but I SHOULD be able to tell my phone where I want the file downloaded, no matter what extension it is, and then open it at my own freedom whenever I want. And this is non negotiable.
Image Editing: as a blogger, I always need a specified image size for the pictures I insert. Nokia’s image editor allows cropping and resizing, but there’s no way I could define my own image size like on photoshop for example. This may not be of high relevance to a lot of people out there, but it’s something we should mention since it was one of the reasons I had to secretely take my laptop out of its hideout and use it for image editing and uploading.
Inserting accents: I wonder whether I’m stupid or blind or whether there is really no way to insert accented characters on the E90’s Qwerty. The only solution is to close the lid, go to the external 12-key keypad and write them, then go back to the qwerty. Frigging unbelievable! Tell me how is a french, german or any other european businessman supposed to send a decent email this way?!
This concludes the limitations post concerning using the E90 as a laptop. No I didn’t last a full 2 weeks without my laptop, mainly because of connectivity and lack of image editing. Stay tuned for tomorrow as I explore the advantages of the E90 over my laptop.
