I’ve pointed you to Martin Sauter’s blog before, he’s usually got some great articles. One of his frequently-recurring themes involves chatting with normobs about their phone, to see what things frustrate them, and what things come as obvious. The latest, Martin recommended that a friend pick up a Nokia N78, which they did. The friend figured out how to download and install Opera Mini, which is a good sign for Nokia, but had a few other interesting issues.
Two things stood out to me, especially. First, this friend had some confusion around the phone’s built-in GPS receiver, and specifically, why it wouldn’t pinpoint his location while indoors. Of course, that seems rather daft to most of us – it’s satellite, of course it isn’t going to work indoors (though Nokia is working on this, actually). However, I’ve seen more than a handful of friends and family members with the same confusion. It’s reasonable, given that every other feature on a phone works indoors, that GPS should too, right?
Martin’s suggestion is that perhaps Nokia Maps could have a message on its initial boot that recommends the user go outside to get a satellite lock, and I have to agree with that. On the plus side, though, is that the access point for the aGPS was automatically configured.
The other point is one that’s annoyed me for a long while, but I’ve never been able to really offer a concrete suggestion as to how it *should* work – until now. This person has installed Opera Mini on their phone, but hadn’t figured out how to set it to the Active Standby shortcuts – instead he was opening the menu and navigating to the Applications folder, then to the bottom of that list to open the program. Indeed, it’s a nightmare on S60 – v3 and v5 – to set the various applications that appear in the Active Standby shortcut list. So how could Nokia fix this?
My suggestion is to add an entry to the Options submenu when you have an application highlighted, something like ‘Send to Active Standby’. This would be alot easier than opening Settings, General, Personalization, Standby Mode, Shortcuts, and then scrolling through a massive list of everything on your phone (steps taken from the N79).
What do you think? Specifically with the Active Standby organization, do you think that would help, or would it only make things worse?
