When I had my short hands-on time with the Nokia N97 Mini and its firmware 2.0, one of the highlights of my experience was the improved scroll and search system, which I showed you on video. Later, the original Nokia N97 received this firmware update as well, bringing the same functionality. Practically, this new system in the music player shows you the first letter of the songs as you scroll through the list, and pops up a nice window on top of the list when you start queuing in a word to search for. I thought this system is an improvement over the old one as I didn’t have a lot of time to play with it, but as it turns out, there’s an ugly side to this change.
Norman John, on Symbian World, has just written an article highlighting two issues with the new search system. The first one is that you can no longer search for a word that isn’t the first one in the song/artist/album name. Let’s say that I typed “soul”, the N97 will look for songs that start with “soul” and won’t show me “The Man Who Lost His Soul” (by Until June) as one of the search results. The second issue is that you can’t edit your search term once you type it. For example, if I typed “sol” instead of “soul” and tried clicking the backspace to delete the l, the N97 will actually think that I’m trying to delete the highlighted song and not the search string letters.
You can head over to Symbian World to read what Norman has to say about these 2 problems. This is once more an instance where you think Nokia has improved a feature and it turns out that it wrecked the basics behind it but added a bit of an eye-candy look to it. Will it be fixed in a later firmware? Well, who knows!
If you own a Nokia N97, do you use its music search feature and have you run across these issues? I know many of you like finding solutions for problems that needn’t exist in the first place, so have you found a workaround for these 2 problems?
[Screenshots courtesy of Symbian World]
