Jonathan Oxer
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Blog > My Nokia E61 sucks
>> My Nokia E61 sucks
Tue, Dec 26th 10:18pm 2006: Tech Toys
Frustration! On paper the E61 looks absolutely perfect for what I want, but in reality it's driving me nuts. Every single thing I want to do with the phone is broken in some annoying way.
* WiFi. This is the one clincher feature that made me choose the E61 over a Treo. Great in theory: almost all my time in spent either at work or at home, so with an access point in each location I'd have buckets of cheap bandwidth whenever I want it and without running up big bills on my mobile account. And it kinda works: it even has some nice features like "access point groups" so you can do things like define a group encompassing your home and work APs, then set policy that the inbuilt email client will only connect via APs in that group. But WiFi *only* works if the network is left totally open and unencrypted. The E61 supposedly supports WEP (64 and 128 bit) and WPA, and I was determined to make it work but after about 5 hours of trying I gave up. Not once could I make it connect to anything but a wide-open AP.
* Network instability. Even while connected successfully to a wide-open AP with full signal strength it ocassionally just goes off into never-never land, with connection failures reported (both web and mail).
* VoIP client. We have an Asterisk server at work with VoIP phones on all the desks so the idea of a cellphone with built-in VoIP client is a dream: I could do away with my desk phone entirely, use the cellphone in a cradle with a bluetooth headset and WiFi connection to the Asterisk box, and just use the same phone everywhere I go. VoIP at home and work, cell on the move. Perfect. Except that after about 2 hours of trying I couldn't get it to register with the Asterisk server.
* SyncML. The phone supports SyncML which seems to be pretty much the standard way to keep calendars and contacts in sync nowadays, and I got it to successfully sync with the free GSMSync service (which is very cool, by the way) but sync with Evolution? No way. Another 3 hours or so down the drain trying to make the %$&%# thing do what should have been up and running in 3 minutes.
* Keyboard layout. I read on a blog somewhere that applying the latest firmware update to the phone (44MB! but then it's probably the entire OS) fixes some network instability problems so I installed it, but now my keyboard layout is messed up. All the punctuation keys have shifted to new locations so I have to remember where they are or do a lucky-dip and be prepared to delete a lot. And in the original firmware I could do an "insert special character" operation to get to the extended character set, but that seems to have disappeared after the update meaning I can no longer type "<" and ">" characters at all.
* SSH. Another of the killer features - in theory. One of the first things I did after getting the phone was install Putty, and it's truly a remarkable thing to be able to SSH to servers or my desktop and drive them from my phone. And before the firmware update it worked beautifully, but now it doesn't seem to handle remote updates asynchronously. What I mean is that if I type a command and hit "enter" it gets sent to the server and I see the response, but if a process running on the remote end sends output I don't see it until I hit enter, and then there's a spurious enter sent through. For example if I run "top" remotely it fails to update the display every 2 seconds as usual unless I keep sending through keypresses. With "top" it's not too much of a problem, but if you're interacting with something that's prompting for input it can be a killer: you can't see the prompts without sending a keypress, but the keypress can then be interpreted as your response to the prompt. Perfect if you're accustomed to working by ESP, painful otherwise.
* No touch screen. Actually I wasn't even aware of this when I bought the phone: I just assumed it had a touch screen, and when I opened the box at work one of the guys asked where the stylus was. At first I didn't care, but the more I use it for browsing the more I'm feeling the lack of it.
* Slooooooow. I've heard from people that Symbian devices are much snappier than WinCE-powered phones, but I find that hard to believe. If it's really true then WinCE must be not just a three-legged dog but more like a one-legged dog, because Symbian often spends so long thinking about doing things that I start wondering if I even pressed the button properly. I'll select a couple of emails, click "delete", and maybe 15 or 20 seconds later it will come up with the "Deleting messages" dialog. A few seconds later the operation completes and the dialog goes away. Frustrating, but not a real user-experience-killer unless you happen to be multitasking at the time such as talking to somebody while deleting messages. Click delete, look away for 10 or 15 seconds while talking, look back at the phone and have no visual feedback that anything has happened, is happening or is about to happen, and start navigating down the message list only to have the "Deleting messages" dialog pop up unexpectedly. After that little sequence has happened to you a few times it's hard to resist the urge to throw the phone across the room. "Sluggish" just seems to sum up the whole experience.
There are other problems but I'll whinge more another time. The overall experience of this phone has been to make me feel like a totally clueless newbie who couldn't find the "on" switch for a TV if it was 10cm wide and flashing red. Every single thing I try with the phone is a total wash-out. Maybe if I could get just *one* thing working properly I'd have some sense that I'm not a total idiot. Please, Nokia, throw me a bone!
Frustration! On paper the E61 looks absolutely perfect for what I want, but in reality it's driving me nuts. Every single thing I want to do with the phone is broken in some annoying way.
* WiFi. This is the one clincher feature that made me choose the E61 over a Treo. Great in theory: almost all my time in spent either at work or at home, so with an access point in each location I'd have buckets of cheap bandwidth whenever I want it and without running up big bills on my mobile account. And it kinda works: it even has some nice features like "access point groups" so you can do things like define a group encompassing your home and work APs, then set policy that the inbuilt email client will only connect via APs in that group. But WiFi *only* works if the network is left totally open and unencrypted. The E61 supposedly supports WEP (64 and 128 bit) and WPA, and I was determined to make it work but after about 5 hours of trying I gave up. Not once could I make it connect to anything but a wide-open AP.
* Network instability. Even while connected successfully to a wide-open AP with full signal strength it ocassionally just goes off into never-never land, with connection failures reported (both web and mail).
* VoIP client. We have an Asterisk server at work with VoIP phones on all the desks so the idea of a cellphone with built-in VoIP client is a dream: I could do away with my desk phone entirely, use the cellphone in a cradle with a bluetooth headset and WiFi connection to the Asterisk box, and just use the same phone everywhere I go. VoIP at home and work, cell on the move. Perfect. Except that after about 2 hours of trying I couldn't get it to register with the Asterisk server.
* SyncML. The phone supports SyncML which seems to be pretty much the standard way to keep calendars and contacts in sync nowadays, and I got it to successfully sync with the free GSMSync service (which is very cool, by the way) but sync with Evolution? No way. Another 3 hours or so down the drain trying to make the %$&%# thing do what should have been up and running in 3 minutes.
* Keyboard layout. I read on a blog somewhere that applying the latest firmware update to the phone (44MB! but then it's probably the entire OS) fixes some network instability problems so I installed it, but now my keyboard layout is messed up. All the punctuation keys have shifted to new locations so I have to remember where they are or do a lucky-dip and be prepared to delete a lot. And in the original firmware I could do an "insert special character" operation to get to the extended character set, but that seems to have disappeared after the update meaning I can no longer type "<" and ">" characters at all.
* SSH. Another of the killer features - in theory. One of the first things I did after getting the phone was install Putty, and it's truly a remarkable thing to be able to SSH to servers or my desktop and drive them from my phone. And before the firmware update it worked beautifully, but now it doesn't seem to handle remote updates asynchronously. What I mean is that if I type a command and hit "enter" it gets sent to the server and I see the response, but if a process running on the remote end sends output I don't see it until I hit enter, and then there's a spurious enter sent through. For example if I run "top" remotely it fails to update the display every 2 seconds as usual unless I keep sending through keypresses. With "top" it's not too much of a problem, but if you're interacting with something that's prompting for input it can be a killer: you can't see the prompts without sending a keypress, but the keypress can then be interpreted as your response to the prompt. Perfect if you're accustomed to working by ESP, painful otherwise.
* No touch screen. Actually I wasn't even aware of this when I bought the phone: I just assumed it had a touch screen, and when I opened the box at work one of the guys asked where the stylus was. At first I didn't care, but the more I use it for browsing the more I'm feeling the lack of it.
* Slooooooow. I've heard from people that Symbian devices are much snappier than WinCE-powered phones, but I find that hard to believe. If it's really true then WinCE must be not just a three-legged dog but more like a one-legged dog, because Symbian often spends so long thinking about doing things that I start wondering if I even pressed the button properly. I'll select a couple of emails, click "delete", and maybe 15 or 20 seconds later it will come up with the "Deleting messages" dialog. A few seconds later the operation completes and the dialog goes away. Frustrating, but not a real user-experience-killer unless you happen to be multitasking at the time such as talking to somebody while deleting messages. Click delete, look away for 10 or 15 seconds while talking, look back at the phone and have no visual feedback that anything has happened, is happening or is about to happen, and start navigating down the message list only to have the "Deleting messages" dialog pop up unexpectedly. After that little sequence has happened to you a few times it's hard to resist the urge to throw the phone across the room. "Sluggish" just seems to sum up the whole experience.
There are other problems but I'll whinge more another time. The overall experience of this phone has been to make me feel like a totally clueless newbie who couldn't find the "on" switch for a TV if it was 10cm wide and flashing red. Every single thing I try with the phone is a total wash-out. Maybe if I could get just *one* thing working properly I'd have some sense that I'm not a total idiot. Please, Nokia, throw me a bone!
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