Better Phone
May 02, 2004
As you may remember, I got myself a new phone just a little while ago. It was a Samsung E700 and, at first glance, it seemed to be quite alright. After a week of regular use, however, the fact that it's far less than "alright", one may even describe it as "quite bad", bordering on "useless", became apparent to me. Having used it for no more than two weeks, I got rid of it, I couldn't take it anymore.
It's not that it wasn't "powerful" or "feature rich" enough, it was just horrible to use. Unlike Nokia and SonyEricsson phones, the user interface was clunky, unintuitive, overall quite poorly designed. Take the address book for instance, easily the most important and most used feature on a cellular phone; on SE and Nokia models, it's just a single keystroke away, whereas it's a whopping three keystrokes away on a Samsung E700 (and other Samsung models I believe).
So I sold it, and instead bought a very barely used Nokia 6230 instead. By "very barely used", I mean for no more than a week. I'm very impressed by my shiny new Nokia 6230. It does everything, really. It has a camera, which takes better pictures than any other camera phone I've ever seen, including the Samsung E700. It has a radio and an mp3 player built-in. It comes with a 32 MB memory card (upgradable to a full gigabyte unless I'm mistaking), on top of the 8 MB built-in memory. That's a lot more than the E700's total 8 MB, not to mention the SE T630's mere 2 MB.
But the best part of any Nokia phone is not the figures or the highlighted features; the best part is that the user interface fucking rocks. Everything works as you expect it to work, and it allows you to do anything you want it to do. The E700 lacked a lot of features, not high-profile features such as "it has a camera", but small important features such as finding phone numbers or URLs in SMS messages.
Another great thing about the Nokia 6230 is that it's pretty much lightning fast. Nokia models are usually fast, but this model is really fast, faster than I expected it to be. High-profile bullet-point features are, in a word, nice, but the thing that matters the most to me is that the phone is easy and simple to use for every day things. For me, any recent Nokia model is that. They work exactly as I want them to work. It also takes pictures and even small video snippets, which is nice and fun once in a while, but it's just icing on the cake.
My new Nokia 6230 isn't the only new gadget in the house though, my lovely girlfriend bought an iBook the other day as well. We've both used Macs before, but not as extensively as we've used PCs, so I'm not sure how much of an impact this is going to have on me.
I'm very much not a zealot about computers, I'd like to think that I call 'em as I see 'em, without getting emotionally attached to any brand of hardware, nor software, so don't expect me to join the Apple Fanboy Choir anytime soon. However, Mac OSX is very elegant, and very stylish. Expect several entries on that topic in the near future.
Comments
The phone book on my Samsung A310 is only one keypress away. The UI isn't amazing or groundbreaking (in the way that, say, the iPod's scroll wheel is), but it's intuitive enough that I was able to figure out how to do everything without ever reading a manual. I've used an older Nokia before and I would say the two are pretty comparable.
Comment by Aaron at 21:52, 02 May, 2004 #
My Samsung N181 phone book is only one keypress away too. Maybe you just had back luck Tomas! That said it was my first mobile and it doesn't handle like a Nokia much to my friends disgust :)
I'm liking the embeded Quicktime! That's cool. The picture quality on phones is getting to the point where they can almost replace normal digital cameras, except in the case of 'professional' photography I guess.
Comment by cyberhill at 00:25, 03 May, 2004 #
I agree, Nokia rocks. I myself have had my 3650 (which is similar in specs to the 6230) for a year now. It has everything you could possibly want.
It runs the open OS called Symbian, which is free to develop for, which means there is a _lot_ of software around for these phones. It has the camera, which is pretty good considering the age, videoplayers, MMC card etc etc.
Also some picks of extra software I have are the full mobile version of Opera, IM+ (all-in-one: MSN, ICQ, AOL etc), Wireless irc (irc over gprs) and GoBoy, a complete gameboy emulator.
There's even a port of PuTTY with full ssh support for it.
In other words, all a tech-nerd like me could possibly want. The only drawback is the design of the phone, which is pretty ugly. But it has a nice big screen, so I can live with that :)
Although, I drool over the 6600, which is basically an enhanced 3650 with a new spanking design.
Comment by Lego at 11:58, 03 May, 2004 #
Oh yes, I think you very much will become an Apple choirboy in the near future :)
Comment by swimp at 12:08, 03 May, 2004 #
Join us. Together we will rule the... Wait... What was I saying?
Comment by Michael Heilemann at 16:13, 03 May, 2004 #
On my Samsung X600 the address book is *two* keypresses away. This is insane. How can the UI be so bad that they can change it for every phone they release, and still fail to make it good?
And now I'm regretting buying it. But, well, it was the cheapest phone with a reasonably good camera, and it's 200 euros cheaper than the Nokia.
Comment by garoo at 02:25, 04 May, 2004 #
I switched from a Nokia 3390 to a Sony Ericsson T610 a month ago. The UI on the Nokia was very good, but it lacked all the "cool" features of new phones. The T610 is much more fully featured, but lacks some of the usability goodness of the Nokia. I used to be able to simply press "up" to get to the list of most recent outgoing calls. I used this all the time to call the people I called the most. I hardly ever used the phonebook ("down" key). Sadly, the T610 lacks this feature, and it pisses me off. It's easy enough to get to the phonebook ("down" or "up" key) but it's now 6 keystrokes to get to recent calls. Plus, the response time on keypresses is way slower. I like the phone well enough, but I've used better. Oh well, it was negative dollars after rebate, so I can't really complain too much!
I guess it'll be back to Nokia for me when the time comes!
Comment by Tom Werner at 05:23, 04 May, 2004 #
Where can I get a nokia 6230 in USA? what is the best deal and who are the service providers? am amazed with the features - pl. guide me to get one.
Thanks
-Sridhar
Comment by Sridhar at 21:08, 07 May, 2004 #
The discussion has been closed on this entry. Thanks to everybody who participated.