I was expecting the switch between Windows Mobile and a Symbian powered Nokia N95 to be kind of like switching between Mac and Windows; the commands are in different places and things look a bit different but when you look at the big picture, it’s pretty much the same. I was also expecting to see some really nice things along with some frustrations just as Rita Khoury mentioned in the discussion about her visit to Windows Mobile from the Symbian side.
Today I’ll talk about a few of the frustrations I encountered in my visit to the Symbian side of life and later we’ll discuss the really nice things.
First off, a smartphone needs to be able to synchronize with my Outlook information. I took care to follow the instructions in setting up the N95 to sync with Outlook 2007. I downloaded the latest version of the Nokia software specifically for the N95. The installation went fine, and syncing seemed to be successful. All of my contacts were now in the phone (with their photos), along with my tasks and notes. However, my calendar was blank on the N95 and I couldn’t even navigate it. The calendar application would actually just disappear when I tried to move to a different date. Needless to say, this is pretty unacceptable. I tried rebooting the phone, resetting the sync profile. Nothing worked.
Normally, with my Windows Mobile devices, I like to sync my Calendar and Tasks with both my home personal computer and work Exchange server. I also sync my work Exchange email, and my personal IMAP email separately. This is pretty easy to do on Windows Mobile since you just check off the appropriate items in ActiveSync and all is well. With the Nokia N95 I had to download and install a “Mail for Exchange” application in order to enable Exchange syncing. This is no big deal, but the frustrating part is that once you set up an Exchange syncing profile you can no longer sync with your desktop computer. Well, there are repeated warnings against doing this at least; saying that you may corrupt the data and create many duplicates. I don’t want to corrupt my data and create duplicates, so I decided to do the Exchange syncing and stop syncing with my desktop since that didn’t work anyway. This would mean that my personal contacts would no longer sync with my home computer and would remain static on the phone (since I want my work Exchange contacts to remain separate).
The good news is that when I synced with Exchange, my calendar became fixed! But there’s still some other limitations with the Exchange syncing implementation. While the direct push works well, the email part only syncs the Inbox. I have found no way to access other folders, the sent items, or draft emails. There’s no way to search your entire account for emails, nor access the Global Address book. You can’t even search the emails that HAVE been downloaded like you can in Windows Mobile 6.
The IMAP email implementation is pretty limited as well. This again only syncs the Inbox. You can’t access other folders such as Sent Items or Drafts or any custom folders. Furthermore, it does NOT copy sent messages to the IMAP server’s sent folder like Windows Mobile and most other IMAP email clients do. The mail program does share some limitations with Windows Mobile though; there’s no way to save drafts to an IMAP or Exchange server and Reply/Forward status is not communicated with the server either.
The next annoying thing about the Messaging application is that there’s no predictive text in the To fields whatsoever. Not even T9. With Windows Mobile, I’m used to just typing the first few letters of the person I want to write to and it quickly offers suggested matches for me to select. On the Nokia N95, I have to create a new message, open the address book for the To field, then use the numeric keypad to type each letter individually (3 presses of #2 for the letter C)… then finally select the contact I want. There’s no “check names” command either.
At least there is a type of predictive text available in the message writing field, but it’s only T9. It does not show any listing of possible words, nor does it offer next word autocomplete suggestions based on previously typed sentences as Windows Mobile 6 Pro does.
See also:
Nokia N95 in the House!
Originally published on Pocketnow on October 26, 2007. More Thought articles from the Pocketnow archive.