As part of the release of a new version of Nokia Messaging earlier this week, Nokia also announced that the S60v5 version, with touchscreen support for the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and the upcoming Nokia N97, will be available in May. However, I was lucky enough to get a sneak preview of this new release, to help them alpha test it on my Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. This new client supports HTML email, just like the latest S60v3 version, but is reformatted for the finger-friendly user interface.
Below is the inbox. Each email gets 3 lines, unless it’s highlighted. The first line is obviously the sender, along with the date you received the email. Below that is the subject line, if any. The third line is, in my opinion, unnecessary, and gives you the first few words of the actual email body. I would like to see the option to eliminate this line in favor of showing more emails in this inbox view, personally.
You can see that the buttons are nice and big, allowing for full finger navigation, with no need to touch that pesky stylus – just like the rest of the S60v5 interface. In the inbox, there are three buttons along the bottom of the screen – reply/forward, delete, and compose. The reply/forward pops up a small submenu allowing you to pick which action you want, and I think that’s an excellent way to fit more shortcuts on this main screen.
If you press the ‘Options’ button at bottom left, you have quite a few tools, some of which I was definitely glad to see. You can easily mark a message as unread, or search through your email. However, one thing I was extremely excited about is the Multiselect option, which has already come in handy a few times, given the lack of hardware keys on the 5800 XpressMusic. You can also easily force a send/receive in this menu.
You can use the scrollbar on the side to scroll through your inbox, but you can also simply ‘grab’ a place and drag it to scroll. It is not kinetic (yet), but it’s definitely a pleasure to use. You can touch a specific email to enlarge it so that it shows 4 lines of the actual message, instead of just the first. This is handy as a sort of preview before opening the entire email. Another tap opens the email fully.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the larger buttons severely limit the reading space for emails. The arrow buttons at the top right allow you to easily scroll from one email to the next, without having to go back to the inbox first, which is certainly convenient. As with the inbox, you can simply grab and drag a specific spot on the email, which is much easier than having to use that silly scroll bar. Unfortunately, it is not kinetic scrolling.
Along the bottom of the single message view, you can see that the buttons are mostly the same, with the reply/forward and delete buttons in the same place. However, the compose shortcut is replaced with the ability to flag a message, for attention later.
The message composition screen is about what you would expect, with easy access to adding a recipient from your contacts list, as well as CC and BCC recipients. The bottom three shortcut buttons are a send (greyed out cause I haven’t added a recipient), attachment, and priority. The attachment feature allows you to freely browse both the phone’s internal memory or your memory card, and doesn’t seem to restrict the type of file, which is good.
Unfortunately, on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, there are a few things that this is missing. For starters, there’s absolutely zero integration into the homescreen – similar to most Nseries. I would have hoped this would change, and it definitely could, seeing as how this is simply an early Alpha (the full client is expected in May). The 5800 XpressMusic’s Active Standby is already pretty much useless, so having email added would be a definite usability boost.
I’m also disappointed that there isn’t a ‘full screen view’ for reading emails that would clear out all of the extra nonsense that results in the tiny reading window. I would like to see a full screen view that would be similar to the video player, where the email message takes up the entire display, edge to edge, and has a transparent toolbar that pops up, allowing you to move to a new email or respond to the current one.
What do you think, so far? I have to say, I’m definitely impressed, and think this could easily be a phenomenal touchscreen email setup. What other user interface tweaks would you like to see?
