After unboxing the Nokia 6790 Surge for AT&T, and sharing some of my first impressions, I’d like to list out a few of the things that I absolutely abhor about this phone. This is not a comprehensive list of faults that the phone has, nor is it meant to say that everyone will hate these aspects. It’s just a list of things that stick out to me like a sore thumb.
1. Auto-rotate. Based on the design of this phone, there’s really no reason you would ever use it in portrait mode, so I’m not really sure why Nokia decided to put the ability for the display to automatically rotate between portrait and landscape mode. It just seems….lopsided. And frustrating.
2. No niceties. Thanks to AT&T, Nokia had to strip out literally everything that normally comes with a Symbian-powered smartphone, including the USB cable, headphones, and even a microSD card (regardless of capacity). As you saw in the unboxing, it’s literally just the phone and a charger. While Symbian is one of the few smartphone operating systems that can easily be used without ever connecting to a computer, it’s still frustrating.
3. Poor build quality. This thing is clearly built from cheap plastics, and this becomes more evident in the buttons. While the d-pad and navigation cluster are uber-clicky, the trio of shortcut keys below are annoyingly stiff, and have minimal clickiness, which makes using the phone altogether frustrating.
4. The QWERTY. There are literally no extras in the keyboard – it’s just characters, that’s it. No shortcuts to messaging/contacts/smiley faces, and no helpful web shortcuts. Even the @ symbol is 2 keypresses away. I realize it’s nice to have such a large keyboard, but an extra couple of shortcuts wouldn’t have hurt anything.
5. No homescreen email. I realize this isn’t an Eseries, nor does it come with Nokia Messaging pre-installed, but the QWERTY keyboard should be a hint that email will be used on this thing. Instead, on the Active Standby, I’m simply presented with as many calendar entries as will fit. Another annoying factor is that when you first boot the phone, the only email available is AT&T’s lame java-based Mobile Email application. However, if you go through the startup wizard (the one most Symbian veterans skip) then the built-in email application is ‘magically’ unlocked. Even better, I was able to easily install Nokia Messaging using the SMS sent from the site, so I avoided both the default email and AT&T’s java joke.
These are just the top 5 things that really really annoy me about the Nokia 6790 Surge for AT&T. There are a host of others, but I left most of them out, mainly because I realize this is an entry-level device. Complaining about the 2 megapixel camera, for instance, is silly, given that it’s clearly not designed to be an imaging device. Tomorrow, I’ll counter these with the top 5 things I love about the phone, and I think you’ll be surprised at a few of them.
Have you checked out the Nokia 6790 Surge from AT&T? What things about it annoy you?
