There have been a lot of complaints recently regarding the vanishing of certain applications from the built-in Symbian firmware on new devices released by Nokia. There was a time when you could buy an E71 for example and walk away with an incredible out-of-the-box experience filled with discovering new easter egg applications hidden here and there around the firmware. There was even a time when you could at least expect to have one game preinstalled on your mobile, Snake. But it seems that the more we move forward, the more these easter eggs keep on vanishing from the firmwares, without any official statement about them being shut down, or any reasonable explanation.
Snake
Love it or hate it, this is the most enjoyed and the most well known game in the world probably. As far as Symbian devices go, the last one I remember with Snake built-in was the Nokia N95. After that, the game died into N-Gage and was never resuscitated. You could still haunt down a .sisx installation file for S60 3rd Edition devices, but when it comes to Symbian^1 or 5th Edition, there’s no Snake and I have doubt there ever will be. Excuse my nostalgia, but that was an iconic game for Nokia and ignoring it like this is a tragedy.
QuickOffice, Adobe PDF & Zip
One of the first things that amazed me about Symbian phones when I first got them was that they could handle PDFs, Zipped files and Office documents right out of the box. The problem is that recently, Adobe PDF, Zip and QuickOffice aren’t built into the newest Symbian^1 handsets. That is seriously pathetic since S60 5th handsets have big high-resolution screens and should handle PDFs and Office documents much more beautifully than S60 3rd devices with their small low-resolution screens. It’s true that you could haunt down trial versions of QuickOffice and Adobe PDF from the Ovi Store, but they’re no longer free and no longer built-in, and their disappearing makes it even harder for users to see the difference between a “smartphone” and a regular phone. The decision of not including this trio by default baffles the hell out of me.
Internet Radio
A topic quite dear to the heart of our friend Gerrymoth from NokiaAddicts, Internet Radio was built into a couple of firmwares, like the last E71 firmwares, but was never deployed across all S60 3rd Edition devices like it should have been. The more alarming part is that it was never ported to Symbian^1 and the current version doesn’t work on it, which is quite a disappointment for an application that was beautiful and functional from the ground up.
Podcasting
You might wonder why Podcasting is even included here, since it comes built in the Music Player, but that’s not the case with the recent Nokia E52 and E55 devices. Podcasting works well across all the S60 3rd FP2 devices so there are big doubts in our heads as to why it has been omitted from the E52/E55 combo. Is it a sign of the imminent phasing out of the application, or just a silly mistake?!
Barcode Reader
I recently wrote a guide to sharing links in a click between a web browser and a mobile, and it required the use of a barcode reader. For a short period of time, Nokia shipped devices like the E66 and E71 with a barcode reader built-in, but the application seems to have vanished as fast as it appeared. Now the only way to get a barcode reader is to go through the Ovi Store and specifically look for one and download it.
Active Notes
Active Notes is quite of a riddle on Symbian handsets by Nokia. Sometimes it’s there on mobiles that aren’t supposed to be office or work related, and sometimes it’s not on devices that should have it. You never know if you’ll get it or not until you actually have the phone in your hand and see for yourself, which is a shame given that it could easily trump out the default Notes application.
Potentially, a Symbian user who knows what he’s doing and what he’s looking for, could easily find alternatives to all of the above mentioned applications, free or paid, and install them. The problem though arises for new users who take their phone out of the box for the first time and don’t know what to expect. Aside from the Nokia N97 which has been filled with a really silly amount of built-in widgets and applications, every other Nokia Symbian device released recently looks and feels void.
The easter eggs that used to make Symbian so special for first-time users are now gone: no more wow effect for seeing that this small seemingly-regular mobile can handle Office and PDF files, no more excitement for discovering new channels on the Internet Radio, no more restless long hours of playing Snake and trying to avoid hitting your ever-growing snake body. All of that has been taken away. Instead, we get Share Online, Nokia Messaging (which are both really needed and good), silly shortcuts to Facebook, YouTube and MySpace’s mobile websites, and an N-Gage icon with tons of not-really-preinstalled trial games and a free code for a game platform that was proclaimed dead a couple of weeks ago.
If this isn’t a real sign of the pathetic path that Nokia and Symbian are headed towards, I don’t know what is. I wish Nokia could release an official statement telling everyone why have all these nice easter eggs been taken away from our new phones and what is the replacement strategy. Searching through the Ovi Store is cool, but honestly, the strength of a platform is related to the amount of things it can handle when taken out of the box and right now, the Nokia+Symbian combination is really incredibly weak.
