08 August 2006
UI, Menu, 3rd Edition
Everything about 3rd edition is already very well known and discussed numerous times on Symbian Freak. Basically there isn’t anything radically new at first sight; nothing besides new icons layout, instead of old 3x3 grid matrix 3rd ed offers 3x4 matrix in portrait mode and 4x3 in landscape mode with corresponding shortcuts on the keypad. However,, in practice it does not mean anything, S60 UI could be and has to be better; there is still lot of wasted empty space and ugly big fonts and lot of opportunities for improvements in further editions. ProfiMail, same as other applications from the Lonely Cat Games team are the great example how it should likes, every single pixel is very well used.
The most important part of ProfiMail is the fact that LCG authors completely ignore the Nokia User Interface Guidelines and bring completely new, redesigned and user-friendly interface far away form traditional Series60 UI. ProfiMail really brings new dimension into boring S60 applications world, nice and small anti-aliased fonts, popup windows, progress bars and animations, just wonderful, but to be honest it is hard to expect something similar from Nokia in nearest future.
Lets go back to the point; typically most leading features introduced with the feature packs on top of the core software of the current edition will later become part of the core software of the next edition. In practice it means that almost all new features in 3rd edition are already introduced through the three available features packs for the 2nd edition. Besides the few totally new features, probably the most significant of those is the support for Scalable UI introduced with the 2nd Edition Feature Pack 3; as well as the support for SVG graphic, different screen orientation and last but not least is significantly improved UI speed, mainly it is due to the optimized, smaller and faster code.
Due to the superior hardware based on the already mentioned Texas chipset on Nokia N93 everything is even faster, first menu loading after reboot is incredible fast, it loads in less than second and browsing trough the menu is rapidly faster than on the 2nd edition. Apart from the speed menu is improved with one really useful feature, now it is possible to uninstall applications straight from the menu without the necessity to run app manager and look for the unwanted application, all you have to do on 3rd edition is to highlight icons, hit is C key and follow on screen instructions.
All other default applications basically remain the same, all except the theme menu which is disappointing poor theme editing menu. As you may well already know, the Nokia 6600 was the first S60 device with theme support and with numerous extremely useful functions under theme edit menu, but on 3rd edition it looks completely different. It just offers options to change wallpaper and/or power saver and it is hard to believe that it is even impossible to uninstall theme from the menu, instead of that now you have to go to app manager and look for unwanted them among all other installed themes, applications and games which is quite annoying issue especially considering that app manager seems very buggy in working with themes.
However,, the most important things about 3rd editions is famous new security measures and binary code break.
Figure 1:
S60 platform evolution with possible break points
Figure 2:
History of series 60 platform editions..
Figure 3:
S60 platform evolution from the 2nd Edition to the 3rd Edition with key feature additions listed for each of the releases
Long time ago, with moving from the 1st ed to the 2nd ed, there were only a limited number of breaks and migration was fairly easy but migrating from the 2nd to 3rd ed is not as easy because they are not binary compatible, there are lot of breaks on source code level, and therefore migration from 2nd ed to 3rd ed is less trivial. To be short it means that none of the second edition applications will be able to run on a third edition device and that’s the really, really huge problem for the users.
In last 10 days I’ve tried almost all available 3rd edition application/games and it is sad to say that all useful applications we can count on the fingers of one hand and situation with the games are even worse, so far I found that Sky Force and C2doom for 3rd ed are the only two really playable and interesting games, although I have to say that almost all java games work just fine on 3rd edition as well as numerous flash games but I really don’t like it, they usually look terrible.
However,, it seems that 3rd edition application scene, growing faster and faster same as the number of the devices and users, and I suppose that situation will be better very soon.
Flash light in action |
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*click to enlarge |
The last and the most annoying thing abut 3rd edition is the new platform security system, which is based on the idea that nobody gets access to those data caged directories. This is quite an annoying issue in my personal opinion; it is like having Windows without having access to system or program files directory!? Actually it drops down our so called 'smart phones' to the 'dummy' s40 level and make it impossible to get the most out of our favourite devices by modding and tweaking them to meet our needs.
Anyway, I have to admit that the so called power users are minority in the really huge S60 family and the Nokia mainly takes care about the majority and from that point of view new security measures and all stuff related to data caged directories looks as a really cool and nice security measure.
After all, as the power user I have to say that I’m deeply disappointed with these new measures same as the whole Symbian Freak community, they should leave to us an option to choose between full security and full access. I just hope that it will be fixed somehow soon or later, otherwise I really doubt in further leading position of Symbian OS among the power user population. After all we spend lot of money for our lovely phones and it is our right to even smash it on the flor and jump over it until the beast dies, so please at least give us an option to take the control over our files.
Gallery application:
Considering that the N93 is aimed to be the ultimate imaging and multimedia device I think that it is important to make a brief overview of the default gallery application.
The gallery application is the same one which is introduced with Feature pack 3 (2nd edition) and it is the same on all 3rd ed phones.
There is no doubt that it looks awesome, it causes a wow-effect at first sight but after some time it could become very annoying, especially considering that it slows down as the number of images growth. Well, you see, the newer versions of build in gallery application beside the speed problem has one really huge annoyance, it lacks any kind of sorting and it puts all stuff together into one single bin, stuffs like images, downloaded and recorded video clips, taken screens shots and so long. Now try to imagine how hard it to find right file if you have few hundreds of images and numerous video clips, with mentioned speed issue it sometime seems as a “Mission: Impossible”.
It really has to have some kind of power mode for power user, something like Resco Photo Viewer extended mode. In my personal opinion even stone age Nokia 6600 has a quite better solution. Maybe it does not look so good but it has possibility to arrange images and videos into folders and subfolders. Although theoretically it supports albums, it is completely useless, I mean even if you sort images to albums it leave all of them in main view along with videos and that is quite stupid from my point of view.
The worse thing in this whole story is the the fact that the best 3rd party gallery application, amazing Resco Photo Viewer isn’t ported to the 3rd edition and it will newer be because Resco management have announced news about completely abandoning developing for the Symbian platform and I’m so sad about because they produce some really good and useful applications and I have had really good cooperation with them.
However,, I have to admit that application is a bit faster on the N93, thumbnails creating and loading is noticeable better and scrolling of the zoomed image is much improved, it is faster and smother at the same time. The Real player has also improved a lot and now it has native support for playing even iPod video files (sample) without converting. It means that N93 is not only aimed to be the powerful video recorder, it also pretends to be excellent video player, and it is. The only problem with the video clips is the weird fact that gallery application fail to create thumbnail for the mp4 video clips that are not recorded by the video recorder.
At the end I have to mention that gallery contains a very good & easy to use image editor which has features like Resizing, Cropping, Rotating, adjusting sharpness, adjusting colour tone, and adjusting light & contrast, it also has a few borders and the possibility to insert clipart or text in any colour or size, essentially all inserted elements can be moved, rotated or resized… There is also the possibility to fix red eye but I’m not very satisfied with it, sometimes it works fine and sometimes it’s completely without success, but considering that N93 flash hasn't red eye reduction feature it could be useful from time to time. If you are curious how the editor looks like in the practice you can see check it in my detailed N90 review.
Safari
Probably the best part of the 3rd edition, and one of the things why you should switch to the 3rd edition is the new open source S60 browser, based on Safari's KHTML's engine. I just cannot find right words or sentences to express how good it is. The most interesting thing is the fact that it displays pages how they were designed, without any kind of optimization for the smaller mobile screens; actually you’ll be able to open web pages just like you're browsing them on your PC. The feeling of the real PC browsing is supported by the mouse cursor which is extremely good solution for navigating and it can be easily controlled via the 5-way joypad. It is even capable to load some flash animation and run java script as well.
Even if you try to open larger and complexer pages like symbian freak index you’ll be surprised how fast browser is in rendering as well as in scrolling down on longer pages. Navigation over larger pages is piece of cake, mainly because browser features nice and useful mini-map technology, actually it is a semi-transparent mini-map of the page that appears when scrolling a webpage in any direction, small thumbnail is shown on the screen with red square on top of it which shows your current position on the page. Also via the * and # shortcuts any page could be resized from the 50 up to the 125% and the mini-map also can be activated via the key “8” as the shortcut.
Last but not the least, the browser support RSS feeds, actually even better it should auto detect RSS feeds from the page header (HEAD HTML tag) file and allows user to subscribe to them or not. Of course, the reader isn’t as powerful as the some 3rd application like Resco News Reader but its good enough and allows basic operations and navigation and that's more than enough.
Browsing on the large N93 screen is pleasure especially in the landscape mode but I have to admit that everything looks much nicer and better on the high resolution screens like on the N80, E70, even though it is physically smaller it is still capable to show more information due to the higher resolution. The only annoying issue with this great browser is the fact that it is impossible to switch to full screen mode in the landscape orientation which cause some wasted space. I hope it will be fixed with upcoming versions.
.:[ VIDEO PRESENTATION ]:.
(safari on TV screen)
Messaging
Finally I want to say something about messaging application which has not improved for a long time, as far as I know the last important added feature is the option to arrange messages by sender, type, subject or date and which has one initiating issue on 3rd edition. As you might know S60 phones treat incoming BT and IrDA files as a regular message and moves them into the mail folder what is not very handy solution especially on 3rd edition. For example if you have to send a file which cannot be recognized by the system there is no way to move it away from the inbox or save somewhere else.
With 2nd edition it is not such a big deal, 3rd party file manager can fix it in few clicks but on 3rd edition there is no solution at the moment. As I already said due to the new security management we do not have access to some protected areas including mail directory. This issue becomes even more irritating if the unknown file is accidentally sent as read only or with sys attributes because you will not be able to even to delete it and it could be a big problem with larger files.
It looks pretty complicated but there is pretty simple solution that simply has to be implemented sooner or later. We just have to have option to choose and setup incoming folder for all files received over the BT or IrDA, some kind of the temp directory on the memory card would be perfect place. But to be honest I’m not so optimistic and it is hard to expect such a feature from Nokia soon. At least give to us some kind of save as feature, at least for unknown files. It is the essential feature and it is hard to believe that so called smart phones lacks such a trivial feature.
Oh yes, one more thing related to messaging that would be nice to be implemented as soon as possible, it is the good search feature, with options to search the message by type, sender, subject, date and body. If you are power user that has numerous messages and even more emails in various accounts this is a must have feature. Actually, over all search feature is also one of the missing S60 features.
Bugs and similar wired things.
My phone runs the older firmware version (v 10.0.017) and it is extremely buggy piece of soft, also as far as I know phones in stores run newer and more stable firmware version (v 10.0.02).
In last few days I’ve found numerous bugs but I didn’t make the list and it seems too hard to remember all of them today but I’ll try to mention the most annoying issues. Some of them are already spotted and detailed described in the review.
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The first thing is the the fact that it is impossible to switch to use the main camera in portrait mode.
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The other annoyance is the fact that once when you finish work with the camera and flip phone into standard clamshell or even laptop mode the camera soft stays active and it switch to the inner VGA camera, even worse: if you completely close the phone, the camera soft still stays active.
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Same as on N80 there is no autofocus in the dedicated macro mode which make it almost completely useless.
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Video recorder also should be improved a lot, sometime it captures video with delayed and unsynchronized sound and noticeable jumps and skipping on some videos, although it does not happens very often but it happens.
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I’m sad to say that new phones brings some older bugs, it is hard to believe that Nokia still did not solve the problems with ringtones, sometime phones start to ring with custom tone and then, in a second, switches to the default Nokia tune and then, in another second, switches to silent.
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Receiving a call in the laptop form factor while Real player is active is extremely buggy, it produces numerous errors with constant and ugly beep sounds in the background.
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Sometimes it is impossible to switch the active call to the loudspeaker.
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While you are receiving call in close state it is impossible to reject it or at least I did not found the way how to do it. It is possible to put it on the silent but there is no way to reject the unwanted call and it becomes even worse if you setup active flip because phone opening will cause call accepting.
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Gallery application fails to create thumbnail for all video clips apart from the videos recorded by the phone.
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Phone soft over all is pretty buggy, it causes few restarts per day and it is impossible to shut it up without removing the battery. It is weird that the phone even once froze in completely idle state under my cushion while I slept causing that I overslept and came late to my job.
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The ugly Kernel execution error is very common and it makes impossible to use the my favourite 3 rd party application, of course I’m talking about the ProfiMail, it allows me to install it, setup accounts but it fails on account update with mentioned kernel error.
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*click to enlarge |
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In the laptop mode keyboard shortcuts do not correspond to the menu grid matrix and it can be pretty confusing.
.:[ Nokia N93 - Technical Specifications ]:.
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