One of the highly-touted features of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic was a new homescreen view, dubbed the Contact bar. This view allows you to select 4 contacts, which sit on your standby screen, and you can enter web feeds for them, which would automatically update using your phone’s data connection. The idea behind this is really good – it positions the 5800 XpressMusic as the handset to have for the connected individual. In the promotional videos, Nokia showed how this view could pull in someone’s Jaiku stream, Flickr photos, and even blog posts, to basically bring your friends’ lifestream to your phone, so you could always know what’s going on.
Unfortunately, Nokia didn’t take this Contact bar much further beyond the ‘cool idea’ level, for a number of reasons. Let’s walk through setting this up to find out why…
To get the Contact bar setup, you first need to choose the homescreen theme. Open the menu, then go to Settings, Personal, Home screen, Home screen theme, and choose ‘Contacts bar’. This will kick you back out to your newly activated Contacts bar standby screen, with an icon in the first position. Click on that icon, and you’re presented with the option to choose an existing contact, or add a new one. We’re off to a great start, let’s pick an existing contact.
If the chosen contact doesn’t have a thumbnail image, you’re presented with an opportunity to either select one from the gallery, or snap a new image using the 5800 XpressMusic’s camera. Thus far, the setup is quite nice and user-friendly. The final step is where it all falls apart, and unfortunately, it’s the most important step.
After choosing the contact and image, you need to add your web feeds. There’s a big button for this, labeled ‘Add web feed’. Cool. You’re told that each contact can only have 2 web feeds, which is a bit restrictive, but this is a new concept for a phone, so we’ll roll with it. You can now ‘Add web feed’ or ‘Select feed from a list’. Given that I can only set this up from my phone, and not from a PC, let’s choose the feed from a list.
Oh, wait, there’s no preloaded feeds. WHAT? Surely, it can’t be too difficult to have Flickr, Twitter, Jaiku, and a few other likely web services available, so that all I need to do is type in my friend’s username, right? Apparently, Nokia didn’t get that far, so I’m left first to find, and then manually type in any web feeds for my various contacts. If that seems phenomenally silly to you, you’re in good company.
Oh, that’s ok, then. I can at least type in, for example, Mrs. Guru’s blog URL (thecaddens.blogspot.com) and the phone can find the RSS feed, right? Again, not so fast. This is getting embarrassing. You have to actually type in the exact RSS feed. The web browser on this phone can detect an RSS feed from a website, but this fancy-schmancy new Contact bar cannot. Brilliant. However, after a bit of exploration, I discovered that the ‘list’ I can apparently select a feed from is actually the built-in RSS reader in the web browser.
So, in order to populate this Contact bar, you need to first browse all of your friends’ sites from your phone, and save their RSS feeds in the S60 browser. You can then choose the various feeds for each contact. Sure, this works, but how many typical users would 1. figure that out and 2. go through the hassle to do so? I’d guess a small minority, at best. Why not do like so many other Web 2.0 lifestream aggregation services, and pre-load some of the more popular services in here, so that I only need my friend’s username, and the phone is smart enough to fill in the rest? Wouldn’t that make it so much easier? What’s worse, the S60′s built-in RSS reader doesn’t support the new Destinations, which allows you to prioritize access points, so I have to choose between WiFi and cellular data. Also, the most frequent automated checking possible is every 15 minutes. While that’s fine for a blog feed, if I’ve got my contact’s Jaiku or Twitter feed in there, it’s completely ridiculous.
As with most of my complaints with the 5800 XpressMusic thus far, this could easily be fixed in a firmware update. Let’s see some preloaded Web2.0 services added, Nokia, as well as the ability to use the Destinations, and setup a much more frequent update time frame.
Nokia wants so badly to join this connected world, with its own services and whatnot, but it has trouble executing this. The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is a great opportunity to really grab today’s youth, and the Contacts bar was a BRILLIANT idea to really appeal to the always-connected crowd. Unfortunately, in its current state, it’s only half-baked, and no one wants to eat raw bread.
