Why Nokia 5800 (aka. "Tube") sucks.

...and most of the S60 phones in general.

Ok, so my previous post was a long time ago with high hopes and desires for the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. As we all probably already know it is the first touch screen phone by Nokia. I've had mine now for two months and despite my previous post, my high hopes and dreams, I am now going to tell you where, in my opinion, the Nokia 5800 sucks most.

Please note, when I say "sucks most" it doesn't mean that I think Nokia 5800 is a bad phone. It is, after all, the best S60 phone out there. Unfortunately that is not a huge accomplishment after all the even worse S60 phones out there.

• No proper bookmarking for music or podcasts.
  
• No on demand album art download.
  
• Bad response time in the music player control buttons.
  
• No "play all songs from this album/artist/genre/year". You always have to go through the "see all songs of this artist/album/genre/tag". Elementary usability.
  

All in all, this should be a music experience phone. Take an iPod or SonyEricsson W-series phone and put the music player experience from those into the S60 music player. The music player in the 5800 is the same crappy as they have in S60 3.2.

• The browser. The Webkit browser in S60 is just SLOOOOOOOOW to render pages. End of story.
  
• Panning usually doesn't work. This is related to the previous point. While the page is loading, you cannot pan the page. The page loads slowly => usually you cannot pan the page smootly.
  

I would also like to see some quality in basic functionalities:

• The IMAP email client is buggy. It simply won't show me the latest messages from the university IMAP mail server. Cannot figure out what to do next. Maybe the number of messages in the inbox is too great for the client - I don't know. Bad!
• Bluetooth dies usually at least once during my 2h commute to Helsinki by train when I use it as a modem for 3G connectivity. A remove the battery -reboot is required.
  
• A tap on the icons in the main menu doesn't launch the application. The icon indicates that a press was registered on the icon and the vibra tells me also that the phone registered my tap, but the application doesn't launch.
  

Some integration, please?

• Why (oh WHY!?) is this phone not supported by OVI.com?
• Lack of applications. Why does not even Nokia support S60 5.0 in their new beta labs S60 apps?
  

Most of the issues I listed above are more or less usability nagging, but they are annoying in any case. In these times when the iPhone dictates good usability and is basically the benchmark for what users nowadays expect from an UI, it is quite frustrating to get this 10 year old legacy stuff from Symbian. Yes, there are several good usability improvements as well! For example, I like alot the new standby screen and the the new menu structure.

I just hope Nokia will get back into the game with the N97 with even more improvements to the S60 UI - good luck! :)