Apathy Sketchpad

Recently, I got a new phone. My old phone, a Sony Ericsson K610i, was just annoying me too much. It was falling to bits, the joystick didn’t work, it filled with dust, the screen was tiny, the paint was coming off the buttons, and the tariff was shit. So, I switched tariff and got myself a Nokia 7100 into the bargain. I’m not sure how the naming works, since I’m sure I had a 7110 years ago. I’m not sure when, exactly, but you can look it up because it’s the phone Neo used in The Matrix. Given that we owned The Matrix on VHS, I’m guessing we’re not talking about majorly up-to-date technology here. It had a black and white screen.

Anyhow, that was fine. That phone worked well. I’m bitching specifically about the 7100. It’s a great handset, don’t get me wrong. It feels satisfyingly sturdy, it’s got a decent camera and a good screen, it has a good four-way switch instead of a flimsy joystick, and although the button in the middle of that is too easy to press accidentally, it is, physically, one of the best phones I’ve ever used.

No, my problem with the 7100 is the software it runs. I’ve had it a few weeks now, in fact almost exactly three weeks, and I’ve already noticed the OS is crap. Here are my reasonings:

• When I open the phone, it takes two seconds to activate. That’s not a long time, but two fucking seconds? It’s a phone? What’s it doing?
• Google Maps doesn’t work. That’s the main reason I wanted a big screen. Not wanting to be unreasonable, I considered writing a hack on my webspace to feed the raster maps you get when you do a regular Google search to my phone. But…
• Even basic online content doesn’t work. I consider Twitter to be the basic, simple thing that any phone should be able to do. It’s simpler, even, than just being a phone. But if I try to use slandr.net, the phone locks up, sometimes whining about memory, and won’t do anything again until I take out the battery and hard-reset it that way.
• Today, an option was missing from the menu. I had no way of knowing what that was or if it was important.
• Today, the phone refused to lock the keys because it had a text it hadn’t managed to send yet (because it had no signal). Not sure what sense that made, but I guess the handset was never tested in a pub.
• Looking up contacts take a long time. Scrolling takes a long time, and it generally just takes a long time to do anything.
• The main menu is a 3×4 grid of icons. There is a 3×4 grid of buttons on the phone. The two do not correspond. Who thought that was a good idea?

I just can’t see how this can happen. Today I was in Tesco looking at the bread, and I thought, no, the bread I want is elsewhere, so I went to get that, but got distracted by one of the two hundred and ten other products in between. So I forgot to buy any. I realise this is partly my fault, but Tesco lost money on this (and so would I have if I didn’t have plans for lunch tomorrow anyway). I remember thinking that, by now, Tesco must have run enough shops for long enough that they’d be pretty good at it.

And I feel the same way about Nokia. By now, they should have written an OS for a telephone that could basically go from closed to making a phone call in maybe five seconds. It can’t. It massively can’t. It’s just not satisfactory on any level. I don’t see how Nokia, of all people, are still so shit at writing phone software.

And Sony Ericsson can do all that, but their handsets (while sturdy enough to be run over twice and keep right on truckin’) are shit. They fall to bits and fill with dust and the joysticks don’t work. But the software is great. You can run Google Maps, even if the screen’s not up to really doing it justice. The menus are fast and intuitive…

Is there a phone manufacturer that can do both? And that can do both with a real, actual keypad that isn’t a touch-screen with numbers drawn on? And if not, what the hell are these morons doing?

(Incidentally, I saw an advert today for LG phones, which advertised them on the basis of their interface. That’s amazing to me. It’s not why people buy phones — they buy them for the look and the features — but you spend days staring at and using the interface, so that’s exactly why they should buy a phone. It’s like an advert written by Aaron Sorkin!)