Notes from the N95: v3

Another collection of random notes from the new smartphone, composed on the phone:

I am currently hoping that the next pervasive trend in phone design is the trackball. Blackberry have been doing it for a while now, and Samsung have started. Endlessly flipping a little ball takes a bit more effort than pressing a down button endlessly, but I do suspect that it would feel like less, particularly if it's done properly, with a big spin resulting in a big movement.

Kudos to Opera for including the time as part of the display.

Other things that put Opera one up on the native S60 Web are:

• when a link is selected, any other link on the page that points to the same place is automatically highlighted. This is surprisingly useful.
• more useful handling of big images. Read: you can room in, ran and actually read the text in comic strips.
• fully cached pages for the "back" function. Very neat.
• built-in search engines. I never thought these would be that useful, until I found myself using the IMDB and dictionary.com engines straight from the Opera start page. They really ARE that useful.

I never used to see the point in having an FM receiver in a phone: I have a radio in my car, and when walking or riding I don't want to obstruct my ears. But I can see the point now: for only the second time ever, I'm in a job which involves not constantly dealing with people face to face or on the phone, and although I can also put lots of music files on the phone, the radio makes a good alternative.

But I do wish that it didn't need to use the headphones as the aerial. This is slightly limiting. This may not be obviously apparent, but it can be limiting.

A phone that has a 5MP camera and GPS really should be able to geotag it's own photos, and not have to rely upon third-party applications.

Ditto for geotracking, although Nokia do have their own solution now in their appallingly badly named "Sports Tracker".

Who the fuck had the idea to build web pages for Nokia that make it stupidly hard to download files straight onto a mobile? Fire that twit!

While you're fixing that problem, start using barcodes to give download links. The N-series phones at least are having barcode readers built in now - if symbian-freeware.com can manage it, why can't you? This is even weirder when you consider that you can use Nokia's own website to generate these codes! (If you have no idea what I'm talking about: That's the square box to the left).

None of the ebook readers that I've been able to find can read html. This is quite annoying. One of them can do a perfect job of reformating line breaks, so html is the much better solution. Which is not currently available. Please?