I have a Nokia N95 mobile phone. I’ve generally liked Nokia’s phones from way back when I used to sell them for a living. They always used to have a better user interface, and generally provide a better user interface, I thought.
Not any more.
Right at the moment, I hate Nokia. The brainiacs in Australian government decided, yet again, that we need to change to daylight savings time on a different day from last year, so all the techos dutifully scurried around updating all the Australian computer’s zoneinfo files so they’d change times at the right moment. Except for Nokia and the N95. Right now, if I have my phone set to receive the time from the network operator, the phone overrides what the network tells it and sets the time to UTC+10, not UTC+11.
EPIC FAIL
Because of this, quite frankly, complete fuckup by Nokia, I have had to manually set the time on my ‘smartphone’. And now when I sync my Calendar to other computing devices that actually know what the correct time is, the time for all of my meetings, appointments, etc. are all out by an hour. Getting an on-the-move reminder of when my next appointment is is a vital feature of my phone. I don’t give a shit about being able to play games on my phone. I want my calendar to sync properly, dammit!
To add insult to injury, the update software that Nokia provides can’t deal with being behind a proxy server. It assumes that the PC it is connected to has completely unfettered access to the Internet. In the 21st century. Seriously? So now, even if a patch for the phone’s zoneinfo file was available, I wouldn’t be able to get it without doing some funky hacking to the Windows WinINET settings. And this on a retail computing device?
So, Nokia, here’s a free heads-up: If you want to play in the smartphone market, where half the battle is the quality of the software on the phone, learn how to write software. The user interface on this thing leaves much to be desired. You need too many clicks to get from one point to another and most things are too slow to run. The GPS sync time is downright glacial. Based on my experiences with this thing, I won’t be getting another Nokia.
I really wish the N80 had lasted an extra couple of months so I could have gotten an iPhone 3G instead. For all their faults, at least they’ve got the correct time!