Stop Symbian

Stop Symbian Before It Loads Again!

Symbian, on touch screens, is a total disaster. I used to love Symbian, and I still do, on non-touchscreen phones. Symbian's interface isn't designed for touch-screen use.

Everything about the N8's software is bad. I can't find a good thing to say. When I reviewed theSony Ericsson Vivaz (1.5 stars), I called it the worst smartphone in America, and I blamed Sony Ericsson for the terrible software. Actually, it's Symbian's fault.

We've been tiptoeing around this problem for more than a year. Look at our reviews of the Nokia N97 Mini (3 stars) and the Nokia X6 (3 stars), for instance. Symbian phones are now designed solely for people who previously owned Symbian phones, because the interface just doesn't make sense to anyone else.

For instance: Text entry. The N8's landscape-format virtual keyboard defaults to turning off predictive text and autocorrect (they can only be turned on via buried menu options), and the phone doesn't even have a portrait QWERTY keyboard. In portrait mode, you're triple-tapping on a T9 number pad like it's 1998. That landscape keyboard, by the way, takes up the whole screen, obscuring what you're typing into.

To go to a new Web page in a touch-screen mobile browser, you typically swipe to the top and enter something in the address bar. Not here! It takes four clicks through unintuitive, nested menus to open a new page.

Also, the N8's music player took a long time to scan my memory card for songs in my tests. That made the software feel stale, even though it looks good, sounds good, and displays album art well.

Ovi Maps Navigation gives N8 owners free turn-by-turn driving and walking directions, along with attractively detailed maps and lots of ancillary content from big-name partners like Lonely Planet. So far, so good. But I couldn't figure out how to set the start point to anywhere other than my current location. I later found out that you have to tap on a location and then click "add to route" —it's doable, just not intuitive, like so much in Symbian.

Wow, does Symbian love folders. Nesting folders on a non-touchscreen phone makes a lot of sense, because it takes a lot of clicks to get through a long menu. But when you can scroll a long distance with just a flick of your finger, hiding options multiple taps deep is just frustrating.

Everything seems to involve more clicks than necessary. Take adding an app shortcut to the home screen. I couldn't figure this out initially, because if you click on the home screen and add "Shortcuts," you get a preprogrammed shortcut bar with no obvious way to change its contents. Instead you have to click the bar you've added again, pick "Settings," choose one of the four shortcut slots from a separate text list, pick "Application," and then choose what you want. It gets the job done—in the most awkward, unintuitive way possible.

The hideous software even damages the N8's two positive experiences. Where most of the rest of the smartphone world is working hard on multiple address book integration, the N8 syncs one, and only one, at a time. I could get my Microsoft Exchange contacts, but not my Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Yahoo address books. You can append Facebook and Twitter information to individual contacts, but you have to enter them one at a time, using an interface with several steps per contact. That's just a no-go.

The camera app, meanwhile, has trouble turning off. I sometimes had to stab an unresponsive touch button several times to quit the camera.

Nokia has sped up considerably and smoothed-out login problems in its Ovi app store, but there's still very little in there that anyone would want to download. I typed in two dozen popular American Web brands and content providers and came up with only a few apps. Want to enjoy media? There's no Netflix, no Pandora, no Slacker Radio. Nokia offers three proprietary Web TV channels, which are outdone by any carrier's MobiTV lineup. (And no, MobiTV is not available.)

Nokia's own TV commercial for the N8 shows how unaware the company seems to be. The commercial calls out as top features "three home screens" (competitors all have more), Ovi Store (without U.S. content), and Symbian^3, which is meaningless to Americans.

I could go on like this for a while, but you get the point. The touch-screen smartphone world has a consensus on the way some things should work. If you're going to buck that trend, you need a radically usable new idea. Symbian^3 brings a 2004-era, non-touchscreen interface awkwardly translated onto a high-end touchscreen phone. It's infuriating.

If the rating on a review was just about features, the Nokia N8 would get much higher than a 2.5. But I wanted to throw this phone through a window, it was so frustrating to use. Nokia says about the N8, "it's not technology, it's what you do with it." The company needs to take their own words to heart. If you don't make your $549, super-smartphone usable, nobody will want to do anything with it at all.