What’s Your Least Used S60 Feature?
We always talk about the most useful applications, the newest and most important features, we make bulleted and numbered lists, top 5s or top 10s. But what about the least used features, you know, those you explore once every few days, weeks or months, or those you don’t explore at all?
I know that what I’m about to say is almost unethical knowing that I’m passionate about phones, but the least used feature on my S60 phone is… the phone. The dial, the ring ring, the hello, the hang up. Yes, the actual PHONE feature. I don’t use it unless I really have to and there’s no other way around it. If it was up to me, I wouldn’t answer calls either. It’s such an intrusion to my life and a very poor way of communication, in my personal opinion.
I’d much rather see the person, talk to them face to face, because I am a lot into facial expressions, body gestures and personal interaction. The phone doesn’t allow that. Instead, it requires me to try to understand what the other person is saying or feeling, just by the tone of their voice, and focus on that. I can’t. I need visuals. It makes more sense to me to send an SMS then to call, because in both ways I don’t get a lot of interaction and at least with an SMS, I’m not making the other person stop and answer me right now.
I was just reading Aaron’s tips and tricks for the N82 (lots of good tips, recommended read) when I decided to try the first one. I pressed *#92702689# and waited to see how many hours my N82 has been used for calls, received and dialled. 5 hours 43 minutes. That’s since I got it on July 4th: almost 3 months and a half, AND I moved countries so it was a time when I was prompted to make calls. Most of these 5 hours, believe me, went to the VISA department of the French embassy.
You can surely imagine that I used the camera, the GPS, the web browser and the music player much much more than 5h 43min in 3 months! How about you, what’s your least used feature on S60? And if you could remove one feature that annoys you, what would it be?
Personally, I never use the voicemail in my phone. I truly cannot find the right purpose for using it. And there was a time, when this feature was enabled by default in our phones. The only thing I heard recorded on my voicemail was "cling" sound made by phones put on hook by people, that did not want to talk to the stupid machine. I hesitate to speak to the someones voicemail myself, and I understand this attitude.
Congrats on starting the new forum! I was away for 5 days and the world just did a 360!
Of course this isn't a s60 unique feature so it doesn't really count, but its hard to know which s60 feature remains unused simply because there are so many and in my case i have probably used most of them at some point.
I'll tell you one of my most used s60 feature and one i totally cant do without....the copy and paste feature. It just works and is incredibly useful for many tasks.
I don't need anyone to hold my hand while I'm on the potty. I'm a big boy now, I can decide what application I trust, and how much. The same goes for MIDlets' permission system. It's a good thing that there's a workaround for both of them - that's exactly what I do at once on every Symbian phone of mine.
Just to add, I hate Symbian Signed as a developer just as much.
For the apps, let's see:
Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.2; U; Series60/3.1 NokiaN82/11.0.117; Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 ) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413
needs, it needs so many attempts that I just gave up. Also never, almost, play
games.
- Voice Mail (It costs to have it on my Operator, better to have it in the form of 3rd party
application if I really must have this)
- Voice Dialing (Sometimes useful, but mostly very unprecise and therefore useless)
- IM (Can't get it to work without 3rd party signups. E.g. Yamigo)
Even then it won't become to useful.
- Calculator (Here I've exchanged it with ccalc)
- PTT (Not available in my country)
- Home Network (Slow java program on the PC side. I rather transfer my music
to the device and then play it back that way)
- Modem (You can directly use this function from PC Suite)
- Email (To basic and non-userfriendly. Profimail offers what I want)
- Welcome (Simply just an flash animation and 2 shortcuts to other functions
inbult in the phone, whereas both have their own icons and accessable from
there)
- Settings Wizard (In fact only useful if you buy a simcard from a foreign
country. Else there's always roaming)
- Realplayer (After finding Core Player, even SmartMovie have been discarded.
Though it's nice to have a simple inbuilt player)
- Multimedia menu (Have been using it more recently, but is a bit "messy" if
you don't arrange e.g. your bookmarks first on the internet tab)
That was about all I could think of from the S60 3rd edition.
(As I've sent my N82 for repair, I only have my 6600 and can't lookup for the
apps I rarely use)