N82 the missing review

I spend a lot of time about mobile phones, from personal to career. Over the years, mobile phone has become more than a calling device. In fact, making calls has become more of the secondary, or tertiary, purpose of my phone usage. Rather, I spend the 99% of the time (confirmed by the monthly bill) on the device surfing the web, taking pictures (over 400 last year), writing my blog and uploading videos.
For the nature of it, I have multiple phones and change them frequently too, as in two phones a year. Indeed it's an obsession. Not so much of having the latest and shiniest phones though, rather of a drive to seek the next powerful phone with even greater simplicity--ergonomics. It's hard to make the fastest car on the racetrack, but it's exponentially harder to make the fastest car a useful daily commuter at the same time.
As early as grey/gold themed T68 I have used SonyEricsson as my primary personal phone over the years. Part of it was I used to work for both of its founding companies, but most was of the phone's design and ergonomic elegance. That was till K850i released. Shamed of such a flagship phone, its overall quality was a leap step back, worse than the K810i in a lot of aspects. For the first time I've gone over the fence and have a Nokia.
Little I knew about the N82 or the new S60 3.0 platform, yet like a reasonable consumer, I crawled over reviews and videos before committing another few thousand dollars. Other than repeating the specs, showing the menus and taking a few still pictures, these reviews offered little. None of them gave me the practical aspect for everyday use. So I decided to write about them--the annoyances that I wish I knew of. Perhaps as the baseline for future reference like the UIQ.

Phone book
I will start by the most common, the phone book. S60 has decided each contact of the phone must be a person, because rather than having just one 'name' field like SE does, it has first and last name. What about those 1800 customer service numbers? Having first and last names are just restrictive and unnecessary. Ok, so if it gives user the ability to change the fields, user can make the name a single field themselves. Not a big deal. However, user would have to modify the field to every single time, current or new. It does not do the setting once and for all. And it gets better. Adding or modifying the contact field is only available if the phone language is Chinese. The option of sorting by lastname or firstname is, on the other hand, only available in English. Internationalization should be faithful not discriminative. The logic behind this language dependent option escapes me.
S60 prides itself as a multi-task platform. But what's a truly good multi-task platform is it seamlessly works without user's knowledge. After I finish dialing a call from the phone book, it still reminds open in the background. It has to be closed manually every time. Why make life harder than it is!

Call history
The call history shows the incoming, outgoing and missed calls all in separate windows. It looks organized at a glance. But it's painful not having all of them shown in one convenient list. For those of us who drive, that's one major annoyance. 1 click shows all is essential. Ergonomics, Nokia, ergonomics! A great product is always about the little things.

Absence minded
SMS
Another annoyance is the phone is very 'forgetful'. It doesn't remember all of the user preferences/settings. When it remembers, it only remembers partially and mostly about theose rarely changed. On SMS, it doesn't remember any of the people have been text messaged. No popularity, frequently sent list. For hundreds of contacts in my phone book, I will have to do a search every time I try to send a message to the same people.

Camera
Another example is the camera. It doesn't remember any of the last camera settings, macro, flash, EV values. Every time the camera is on, it goes back to its default. The only thing it does remember though is the camera mode: still or video. I am curious how hard it is to remember everything else. It comes with a 2Gb memory card doesn't it?!

Ergonomics
Speaking of camera, the frustration just goes on and on. After a snapshot is taken, user cannot zoom in on the snapshot. To do zoom, user will have to quit camera and enter the viewing mode. Even so, the zoom in/out takes forever (long progress bar) as it renders each zoom level, even with merely 3Mb pixels photos. Furthermore, not only the center button cannot trigger the snapshot (must be by the top shutter button) but also the most used camera settings such as white balance and EV values are buried down the option list that the user would have to navigate through. No 1-button shortcuts to EV values or colour balance. Torturing user experience.

Latency
Granted, the photo quality on N82 is gorgeous over its rivals. Colour balance and focus are accurate. That is, only if user has the time for them. The camera is awfully slow to be useful. It takes a very long time to focus, worse of between shots. It thinks rethinks and thinks again. Nokia has forgotten the motto in photography, "Don't miss the moment". Instead, Nokia's is "Let's miss the moment". And I have missed many since ownership. Can't imagine N95 camera is said to be slower than the N82's.

Flash from the focus light
Arguably the stupidest annoyance of all is its orange focus light. It lits up for focus aid. No questions there. After the focus is locked in, the focus light flashes once again right before the shutter takes place. It can be reproduced very very easily. Usually the subject is from a distance, the orange light doesn't do any harm and in the dark the xenon flash will help offset the orange reflection on the subject. However, it's a huge problem when the subject is close. In macro situation where the xenon flash is turned off to avoid a white wash, the shutter will open longer to admit more light and the weird orange light just gets in the way. I have had too many closeup pictures (like of food) with a orange reflection in the middle. It's a very stupid bug in the firmware and should be fixed!

Phone status
How much juice is left in the battery? There's no way to know, other than from a third party software that the user has to install separately. The SE 'volume' keys when not in a call or playing music serve as a status key. It shows the phone's number, battery life, current profile and alarm settings. I suppose Nokia didn't think these are important to user, and it takes a non Nokia phone app to find out.

And the annoyances go on. Cannot choose flight mode at startup. Text input does not show a window of the character sequence. Platform relies unnecessarily heavily on PC support. No bulk import phone book. Voice commands useless when it ties only to applications. No magic word to answer or make calls. Can't assign voice command to individual contact. High maintenance to keep the file system organized.

I am beating a dead horse. But I always come back to the point. A great product is all about the little things. Why iPhone is so successful? Not because it has the unparalleled technologies. In fact, its technologies are crippled in a lot of ways. No video capture, 2Mb pixel non-AF camera, no MMS, no 3G, no GPS, etc. Even touchscreen is not new. Its success is due to the fact that it cares about the little things. The ergonomic things. Apple spent 90% of its resource to make the UI experience incredible and the success goes beyond just the iPhone.
Powerful technological features on mobile phones are important but they have to create a great user experience to be useful. S60 still has a very long way to go.