After making a detour with the Sony Ericsson S700i (with fantastic camera but Mobile 1.0 SMS storage limitation) I'm back in Nokia land. Here some random thoughts and findings from the first days of using the Nokia E70:

If you seriously think about using mobile application like blogging, local search, collaboration (mail, IM) - you need a solid human interface to your mobile phone: the built-in thumb keyboard (with background light a la Apple MacBook Pro) has proven to be easy to use.

Compared to the Nokia 6600 (the first Series 60 phone I had) Nokia has done a nice job making the UI nicer. I guess the screen has higher DPI and fonts and UI elements use smooth rendering. That makes especially small fonts good readable. You basically don't see pixels anymore - marvelous.

The built-in browser uses WebCore (from Apple Safari) to render pages. It has some surprising features - I like the back function that shows me the last pages as thumbnails and of course the blazing fast rendering (incl. JavaScript and AJAX stuff)

Sync with Mac OS X done via the iSync Extension from Nova Media - works like a charm. Thx guys.

And yes.. I have the alarm function back that tells me how many hours I have to sleep until wake-up time - the little things that matters ;-)

App compatibility is still bad: Series 60 3rd Edition is brand new and is not backward compatible with older releases. Therefore developers have to recompile and make sure they handle the new security API in their app. Got to work Opera Mobile Browser (native), Screenshot (native), Google Maps (java) - others like ShoZu (java) stop or crash at some point. I'm waiting for the Picostation blogger client to be available for S60 3rd Edition for true live blogging.

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Posted by Cedric on Tuesday, June 20, 2006 at 6/20/2006 12:03:00 AM | Permalink