Software Everywhere — David Beers on Mobile Computing

I went into downtown Chicago yesterday evening to check out the new Nokia store (first of it's kind in the US) and see if I could get my hands on the E61 "NokiaBerry." It's been many years since I was last on the Michigan Avenue "Magnificent Mile" and I'd forgotten how strikingly beautiful downtown Chicago can be.

It had been a scorching hot day, but after the sun went down people came out in droves. The stores, cafes, and sidewalks were bustling. Boatloads of tourists were boarding and disembarking from the big tour boats that cruise the Chicago river a couple of blocks up from Nokia's new digs. That crane on the right hand side of the picture is the site of Donald Trump's latest real estate project.

The new store is smack in the middle of one of the swankiest and busiest shopping districts in the US but I was curious to see if Nokia was drawing enough walk-in customers to justify the astromical rent they pay on this ultra-prime retail space. I can't say whether they were making a lot of sales, but when I got there about an hour before closing time the showroom was packed to the point that it was somewhat difficult to get to the back of the store. I snapped the interior picture below just before leaving and most of the people had cleared out.

I'd already been in the Apple store two blocks up (reaction: I am now officially old) but as impressive as their huge solid glass staircase, super-modern decor, and uber-cool soundtrack were they didn't prepare me at all for the overwhelming sensory experience at Nokia. The entire store is paneled wall-to-wall, front-to-back in large video displays. The displays form unified images with huge graphics spanning their entire length and filling the room with intense color. I'd read somewhere that they also display information about the phones when you pick one off the shelf and pull it toward you, but I didn't see that. The atmosphere isn't frenetic (the colors don't flash at you and there's no music that I recall) but if it weren't for the large number of people in the store it would have made you feel you were a fish in Shedd aquarium down the street. I wonder if people stay long when they wander in during hours that aren't really busy.

So what about the E61? Well, at first it seemed that I wasn't going to get to see one. I'd assumed that part of the point of a store like this was to have all their models on display instead of just the ones people can find in the carrier stores. But apparently they've decided that giving people a bad case of the "I wants" over phones that haven't been released in the US yet only makes them angry, so there's nothing in the store that you can't get from a US wireless operator already. That's the official story and most of the salespeople stick to it.

I wasn't buying it, though. The E61 was made for the US market and has been available for some time in Europe. I could smell that it was in the room somewhere. I just had to find the person who would show it to me.

Come to find out most of the salespeople had been issued E61s a couple of months ago to use as their personal phones. After talking with two other reps, I finally convinced one guy to show me his and got to play around with it for a little while. I didn't get enough time to give a full and fair review of this smartphone, but I will say the following:

• It has a lovely slim form factor that's quite comfortable in the hand (not sharp and awkward feeling like a RAZR). It has a slight wedge shape, deeper at the top.
• The screen is beautiful and the orientation (like that of the Motorola Q) is right for a QVGA smartphone: they should be landscape for best viewing of documents and web pages.
• The keyboard is disappointing. It's true, this is coming from someone who doesn't care much for cramped thumbboards like the ones on the Treo and BlackBerry, so I'm negatively disposed from the start, but the E61 keys seem even closer together than the Treo's, wiggle disconcertingly, and have poor tactile feedback. As with the Treo, it's hard to do even basic stuff like dialing a number without watching what you're doing. But the E61 does have its compensations...
• It's got the best web browser I have ever seen on a mobile device. The browser that Nokia developed in partnership with Apple is truly the crown jewel of the S60 3rd Edition.
  • I found I liked seeing pages in a zoomed-out full-page view, and then zooming in on the part of the page where I see the content--not the banner, not the ads, not a huge column of links, the stuff I want to read.
  • I was pleasantly surprised with the usability of the "mouse" cursor that you move around the screen and click links with. If most web pages weren't so full of links you don't want to see, much less click, I'd prefer the old S60 browser method of cycling through the links sequentially, which is a less touchy operation than using a joystick and pointer. But I had to admit, the new desktop-like design is pretty well suited to the navigation challenges of the modern mobile Internet. I've used this pointer system on the S80 Nokia 9300, by the way, and the new S60 version is slightly better: the joystick is easier to control and can be used one-handed. It's not a perfect substitute for stylus navigation, but it's getting surprisingly close. (Note: only the browser has the pointer navigation)
  • I was also very impressed with the slick navigation through your browser history. It's killer to see your history as a series of thumbnails that you can quickly cycle through to return to a particular page without painfully retracing your steps. The fact that the feature looks really cool is beside the point that it's delightfully functional.
• Office applications (I mostly tried the word processor) seemed adequate, but this is where the absence of a touchscreen hurts a bit. If you're planning on editing documents very much I don't think you can beat the speed and intuition of selecting text with a stylus, moving it around the document, and applying formatting to it. I haven't spent enough time with either S80 or S60 3rd Edition to know if there are keyboard shortcuts to get around using menus when doing this kind of editing (I think S80 does have some) but if the E61 has stuff like 'Ctrl-X', 'Ctrl-V' etc. it could address some of these shortcomings relative to touchscreen smartphones. As has been the case in the past, you can lose formatting of complex documents in the built-in S60 office apps because they undergo a conversion when you open and resave them on the device. I understand that Docs to Go can fix that.
• A handy feature I learned about for roadwarriors who give presentations: you can pair the E61 with a Bluetooth-enabled projector (are there many of these?) and give your PowerPoint preso directly from the phone. That's the theory anyway. I've had enough trouble just using ordinary laptops with projectors that I'm not sure I'd trust it (unless I brought my own projector, and where's the mobile lifestyle in that?)

So when is it coming to the US? No one can say. You can of course go buy an unlocked one online, but you won't get any warranty support for it if you do. Not recommended. There's an interesting issue concerning release of smartphones with WiFi in the US. The folks at the store said definitively that no US operator will carry a WiFi enabled communicator like the 9300i because they don't have strategies in place to generate revenues from it. Sounds like typical wireless operator logic to me, but if it's true, why does everyone expect the E61 to come to the US? And it's not like the carriers don't carry Windows Mobile smartphones that offer WiFi. Still, they were adamant: we'll never see a 9300i here.

Too bad. While I liked the E61 a lot, I'm still most tempted by the staid 9300 with its roomy keyboard, 640-pixel-wide screen, and old-fashioned big-button exterior cellphone keypad and interface. Even without WiFi it would still be my pick among the various stellar smartphones we're starting to see from Nokia on this side of the pond. But if you need a smartphone and were thinking about picking up something like a Motorola Q, forget about that. The E61 is miles beyond the Q. It's certainly a formidable rival for the Treo 700. I'm not a Treo user, so I'll leave it to others to make that comparison.

Oh yeah, there's one other thing. I got to spend a little time in the Vertu section of the Nokia store, which is in a separate glassed in room at the back, and appointed like the Cartier showroom across the street. For those who don't know, a Vertu phone is to a Nokia what a Rolex is to a Timex: they are jewelry intended to impress. Despite myself, I was impressed with these handmade phones. But unless you need 4.2 carats of diamonds encrusted on your mobile phone I recommend passing over the Signature series and getting yourself an Ascent. They're clad in wonderful leather in the back, they have Bluetooth, which the Signature series do not, and they start at only $4,800--much less than the Signature phones which are (if I recall correctly) in the $6k-80k range. These have a wonderful heft to them and the construction reminded me of the heyday of gold pocketwatch making around the turn of the last century.