Review 2 – Home Screen, Apps and Navigation
I hope everyone enjoyed my first basic review. In this second review I hope to cover the home screen, some of the built in apps (calendar, web etc) as well as try to cover some aspects of the phones menu navigation and memory handling. Please note this was first written based on firmware 10.0.012.
OK I’ve updated to firmware 11.0.021 and will make notes in red where needed
HOME SCREEN: Being a new feature to Nokia, I’ve tried to show as many screen shots as possible and I try to cover all the settings that go with it.
So where does one start. I love the look for the home screen in both landscape or normal view. In the options menu you can turn to offline or online mode for your widgets. You can Hide content (also done by sliding the screen left or right) and then you can also edit content. When in edit content mode you can add remove items by either selecting them and going options or holding down on an item. (this can also be done when not in edit mode). One problem though is if you choose to add an item when you home screen is full, you can get an error rather than an option to replace an existing item (hopefully they put this in the next firmware. You can also change the wallpaper, one the nice things here is that you can select a slide show from some or all of your photo’s. Please note this takes up battery power.
Some other quick access items to note here are the Clock and the profile items. By double clicking either of there you are taken to the respective applications. Please see clock and profiles further down.
Ok so onto the widgets. To be honest there are not that many around at the moment. My phone game with a few namely Facebook, Accuweather, bloomberg and one or two others which I don’t use. The main problem is that there seems to be a online offline problem with trying to connect all the time and dropping connections, I’m sure this will be in the next firmware fix. The connect over the last 5 hours has been good so it looks to be fixed for Facebook however I’m still having problems with Accuweather. I did find that sometimes adding new content did cause the phone to crash sometimes. The alphanumeric problems with facebook are also now fixed..
After Firmware update my face book has a menu on the side and the app no longer fits the screen. Not what we wanted.
The Facebook widget is often giving me errors when trying to connect and the alphanumeric keys seem to be mixed up,as a result I am going to remove it from my home screen as it’s very irritating. I’ve also noticed that when the Accuweather widget is loaded, I’m continuously getting pop-ups asking me to connect to the net, I have already done so. With regards to connection I get pretty irrigated being asked all the time when a connection is lost. You can opt for setting a default however on my device if I set my home WLAN as the default and then 3G as my secondary some of my widgets will never connect using 3GP but prefer to complain about not getting a connection from the WLAN. (This of coarse is another thing that can be resolved using firmware).
Another thing that I love about the front screen is the top right section where you can see some of the apps that are running currently, for example, Bluetooth, GPS, Alarm WLAN connection, and the best part is that if you click on that section you get a list of the items and a quick click access to go to the respective menus to disable or change any of the settings you feel you need to. Nice touch…
Home Screen when clear
Top right symbols
Options Menu
Edit Mode
Edit options
Add Item options
MENU BROWSING: This is accessed from the menu button, which is the silver button on the face of the screen. Single Press gives you the menu, press and hold gives you the task manager.The browsing and screen responsiveness is very good on the N97 and faster than the 5800 in most cases. I say in most case because I have noticed the responsiveness of the menus to slow down in two situations. The first when you have transitions on, and the second when the memory starts to run low. Some the affects that this has on the navigation is that selecting icons sometimes does not register, but most they do register but because the next screen/application takes some time to load, that I find myself still touching the icons and when the next screen loads I’ve now already initiated a touch and some random application then loads. I must say this is not always the case, but can be experience in the situations that I mentioned. I do feel, that memory management and firmware upgrades in the future could help solve some of these issues. The icons in the menus look great and clear, you can view the Menu in both grid and list views (Grid being my preference). By touching <options> –> <Organise>, you are able to move applications and folders to new locations if you feel you want to reorganise you menu’s.
Unfortunately when you want to delete an application that you have install(not all apps/folders can be deleted), you need to dig a little deeper in the menu structure than I would have like. <options> –> <Organise> then click the app you wish to delete then <options> –> <Delete>, this once again a preference thing, but would like to be able to delete without having to organise.
The other issue that I have is that on the right (landscape) and bottom (normal view) of the screen there is a menu bar with normally two options <back/exit> and <Options>. It would be great if this was undocked, as I feel it takes up a large amount of the screen, especially for those that have loads of installed.
After Firmware 11 updated I did notice a slight increase in navigation speed which is promising.
Grid
List
Options Menu
Organise Menu
CALENDAR: The reason I wanted to cover the calendar is mainly because I use it a lot and and the N97 being a smart phone I think the Calendar/Task part of the phone should be very good to help us the users organise our time.
I like the calendar in comparison to the N95 8GIG. There are a view different views which you can see below(weekly, daily, Monthly) I prefer monthly, but find that even with monthly set as my default if I enter the calendar from the home screen widget it always opens in the daily menu. However if you open the calendar from the menu system it will open with your selected default. Other thing to note, which Nokia has still not done, and I’m in the process of written a tool myself is that when you add an anniversary or birthday to a contact, it will NOT show in the calendar automatically. I have noticed that sometimes entries that I add can’t be found, this seems strange and could be a bug on my phone.
As normal you can add the following types of entries: Meeting, Memo, Anniversary, to-do note. Over all I really like the calendar.
After firmware 11 update I haven’t had anymore entries go missing so I am assuming it was a bug, and from looking at the change log they did implement a fix for this. Good work NOKIA
Day View
Week View
Month View
PHOTO BROWSER: I wanted to just give a brief menu break down and review of the photo browser. However I will cover photo quality and the camera in the next review.
I’ll start by getting this out the way as I’ve been asked by a few people. “Is it true that you can only see captured images in the default photo browser?””. The answer is yes, and I really hope Nokia change this soon, as it’s very annoying. Videos are also no longer viewed in the photo gallery, but rather in the Videos & TV browser.
Not much else has changed from what I can see in the photo section, you can view by month, album or captured. You can add tags which is nice. With regards to sharing images at the moment there is only built in support for Flickr and Vox. I hope to see facebook and others added soon. You can of coarse use Shozu for you online image sharing needs.
When viewing images you can still edit, rotate and crop images on the go and of coarse view you images in slide show mode this is always nice when you have your TV-out cable connected.
Main Menu
View Images
Image Options
Share Online
MUSIC BROWSER: The music browser is still the old plain Nokia browser. I’m not a massive fan of it, but it does seem to do the job. There is direct access to the music store here if you are inclined to purchase music online. You can access the Radio from here too(must be connect with headsets still).
I have noticed that when I have the music widget on my home screen that is does not always keep up to date with what I am listening to, until the back light goes of and I exit the screensaver mode. Not sure why this is as it happens when I have loads of memory available.
Music Menu
Music Menu
Radio Options
Music Library
Playing
AUTO ROTATE: As with the many new Nokia phones the Auto Rotate functionality is great. By default my phone would only rotate when I opened the keyboard, but going into the settings menu under sensor settings this can be change so that when the phone is closed and you rotate from up-right to landscape the phone will auto rotate. Generally speaking the sensor is pretty good and rotates pretty fast, however I have noticed that when I low memory the rotating does slow down, but nothing to seriously worry about.
TASK MANAGER: There does seem to be some additions to the built in task manager in that you can now close apps directly from the task menu. I personally still think the task manager is limited and I would like to see more options available as a result I am using the trail version of Handy Taskman. However I would say that when JBak Taskman becomes available I would probably use it instead.
MESSAGING: Ok so I’ve covered the keyboard, but lets just say typing messages is a dream. I like the new predictive text functionality which automatically adds words to your dictionary. It also prompts you for a selection of words when you make typing mistakes, and it predetermines some of the words you type, which you can auto-complete by pressing the space bar.
Adding Attachments
Messaging Options
One thing that is really missing are some short cuts for copy and paste, currently you have dig through menu’s and input options to copy and paste, with such a nice keyboard a simple shift+c would be good.
MAKING CALLS: The only problem that I have had here is that sometimes when my phone is locked and I try to call it there is no incoming call, even when the other phone is ringing. I’m really hoping this is just my phone and my network. The slide to answer when you phone is locked takes some time to get used to. The call quality does vary a lot, 90% of the time it’s great, but I have had times when I’ve just hung up and called back as the sound was terrible. I’ve had people that I call complain about poor sound. Once again this is hard to confirm as a problem with the phone so I’m hoping it’s just my operator. The built in flip silent is a great feature which allows you to turn you phone over to silence an incoming call, simple but very useful.
OVI STORE: Well I must say I am some what disappointed by this. At first the Ovi Store app that come with the phone would not work at all. I then had to uninstall and reinstall it. So far so good, and the Ovi store now loads which is great. The problem that I now face and many other N97 users face is that when trying to buy/download any application you will get a “download failed” status for you downloads, please refer to NOKIA DISCUSSIONS for more information, one of the Nokia support people have said that this is being looked into and should be fixed soon. Forgetting the above issue for a second, I still feel that we will need to wait sometime before the software support for the N97 starts to grow. The number of widgets and apps around for this device are still limited. The interface could do with more filtering options allowing users to find apps easier. However I must say that it is great to know that we as Nokia users now have a central area to download and recommend software from. This will open up the world of amazing applications to the everyday user.
Opening
Downloading
Browsing
CONTACTS: Contacts are pretty standard. There is loads of information you can store against a contact, including IM details Skype user names and much much more. When in portrait and you type in a letter to search for a contact, you will only be shown remain letters that will help to narrow down you search which makes things easy for the user, I really like this touch.
SETTINGS MENU: I just wanted to cover some of the changes to the settings menu and some of my personal pro’s and con’s.
One thing that Nokia tried to implement to the profiles section of the phone was a timed profile, however all this means is you can set a profile to expire. It would have been nice if you could set a permanent start and end time for each profile, something like the Best Profiles app for s60 v3.
There is a menu that allows you to set the sensor settings of the phone for example auto-rotate and also the Flit to Silent calls, I love this, and before on my N95 I used to have to install a separate app to handle this function, it’s good to see it built in.
Below are some images of the settings menu’s.
Settings Menu
Phone Settings
Profiles Options (timed)
Sensor Settings
Software Update
Update Options
MEMORY: Ok this is a hot topic and I’ll admit that I am not a hardware pro, so I’ll only be able to give my opinion based on my own experience. Firstly my boot up memory is: 48 – 50M.
Image 1 shows boot memory however because I had a photo screen shot app loaded this dropped down to 43.9M
Image 1
Image 2 I loaded many apps here including web, fring, maps, Sportstracker, music palyer, contacts, log, settings, main menu and afew others. After I took the image the memory dropped to 6.8M.
Image 2
Image 3 This image was taken when I loaded the x-plore when the phone was on 6.8M and as you can see the phone seems to have such down none-essential applications to free memory, so I some of the apps that closed where, contacts, settings, menu, email and some others
Image 3
So as I have tried to show the system will shut down apps with no warning when memory becomes low. When the memory gets to around 10-12M, the phone does start to run slowly, web browsing becomes very slow, and menu browsing becomes very unreliable, meaning that applications take ages to open , menus sometimes get stuck graphical when applications load, and in fact sometimes even after memory has been freed up I have need to do a full reboot, to get everything working again.
However all this being said I wouldn’t normally load that many apps at once so would not expect to in counter this problem on a daily basis. But I would still like to have seen more memory so that we as users could have peace of mind when opening and closing applications. All in all the phone does actually handle it’s memory well and in general the browsing and menu navigation is fast.
SUMMARY: Ok so I’ve tried to cover most of the standard features on the phone, and overall I must say I do really really like this device. Ok it has crashed on me a few times and reboot when memory has been overloaded, but at the end of the day this device gives what it says it does. Some of the more hard-core users out there might struggle with the memory, but some streamlined software updates could help this, but we will just have to wait and see. I will try and update this review when I pick up more fixes/issues in firmware 11
The next review if there is time (I need to send this trail device back tomorrow) will be on Photo’s, Video and Web.
