Sunday 31 August 2008

Nokia's crap new interface

After 4 days of messing around, I have at last configured my new Nokia N95 to look the way I want it to look - almost. Jeez, what a pain in the arse. Nokia have gone from having the simplest, most intuitive interface on the market to having something that feels like it was designed by Eskimos on smack. I have never, ever read the instruction booklet or help files that come with any phone - until now. It's a sad day for Nokia when one is reduced to reading the manual, which also reads like it was translated from Finnish to English by a German. Who didn't understand either language, but was fluent in Swahili.

I have fiddled with an awful lot of software in my time, and I have generally been able to work out how to use most programs within a few minutes. But the Nokia defeated me. Hell, I've even figured out how to use a Mac (after not touching one for 20 years) and been able to do some passable work on Linux based machines.

But not the Nokia. For crying out loud, I have even configured printers via telnet, or by fiddling with a few buttons and pressing them in a certain order. I'm also old enough to remember when modems had to be manually triggered to dial by typing in things like "atdt" and then a string of commands. If I go back far enough, I can even remember what a Telex machine looks like.

All I wanted to do with the new phone was change the shortcuts on the main interface. The ones it came with sucked. I wanted a shortcut to the camera, another to writing an SMS message, and one to the music function. It took me 4 days to figure that out. Four days. That's like 8,000 years in mobile phone years. Nokia probably released 19 new models onto the market in the time it took me to reconfigure mine. And the logic of their interfaces probably sucks dead dog's balls as well.

When this thing breaks, it's an iPhone for me. That was one very easy decision to make. I had to be burnt by Nokia's stupidity in order to make the switch.

And if someone mentions that getting a 12 year old to configure it for me might have been faster, I will turn it into a rectangular supository.

2 comments:

kae said...

Good thing they're making them smaller and smaller, huh?

Anonymous said...

OK, I'm 'phone-aphobic'* but my son just had to get a phone for work and got a Nokia 1650 - cheapest he could find, wasn't impressed with it so far as too many doodads and he just wanted basic function.

My daughter's a Vodafone salesgirl and uni dropout - hmmmm.