If you do not have a nokia series 60 phone now, you should go ahead and pick one now. Why? Read on. I am using nokia E71 as my case study.

The main reason I am writing this article is to help mobile phone users see that they may not need to spend so much on a smartphone if their budget is very low.

This is especially true with start-ups and small businesses. Why would you rather get a data gobbling device or an expensive device if a lowly Nokia Series 60 phone can get the job done?

For the tech junkie this might sound very boring. But, on a second thought, won’t you be doing yourself a great favour if you save some cash for other stuffs?

I am recommending the Nokia S60 for the following reasons:

1. Nokia S60 devices do multitasking well. You can work with some other applications while the previous one is still running.
2. You can expand the memory card and store more apps, music and some other files.
3. Messaging. You have Nokia messaging. It pushes your email directly to your phone. I have my Yahoo email and my Google email set up, and they do not disappoint.
4. More Messaging. Plus, if you want to do SMS-stylemessaging across platforms, you can install a third party app called Whatsapp to message with iPhone, Android, Blackberry and other Nokia users.
5. This is Africa and Nigeria. You know we have power supply problems. The Nokia E65, E5, E71, E72 (all S60) do not consume as much power as most competing products, plus you can get an extra battery for it if you care.
6. If you are a social media junkie like me, knock yourself over with Nimbuzz and Snaptu app. With Nimbuzz, you have access to instant messaging (Yahoo, Gtalk, Windows Live, etc), Twitter, and VOIP calls too. Snaptu allows you to connect to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and some more. Snaptu has its own app store embedded with it.
7. You can go ahead and include Opera Mini and Opera Mobile in the list of available 3rd party apps that add value to your smartphones. With this, you can do almost everything you do on the web. I stream Youtube video with my Nokia E71 powered by Airtel’s 2G/EDGE network. Its streams well using the pre-installed Real player app.
8. I also read my popular blogs and sites with RSS reader via Snaptu app. It is easy and fun. When I see great contents that need to be shared to Facebook or Twitter, I share directly from the RSS reader.

All the above are available at the fraction of the cost of devices from other platforms. S60 devices are great at saving cost and maximizing benefits.

Go ahead, enjoy your Symbian S60 device. If you pick up a new one for yourself, you are not making a wrong choice. I am still rocking my Nokia E71, a typical Symbian S60 device.

What cool stuff have you done with your Nokia Series 60 device of late?

Which of these points I shared would you be trying?

The C3 (left) is an S40 device featuring GSM/GPRS/EDGE (no 3G) and surprisingly Wi-fi.

The E5 (middle) is an S60 3rd Edition device featuring GSM/GPRS/EDGE/3G/3.5G, Wi-fi, a 5 megapixel fixed-focus camera with LED flash, Bluetooth, GPS, and a 3.5mm audio jack, among other features. Like the C3, it comes in a block form factor.

The C6 (right) – clearly a move by Nokia to deliver high-end specs on a mid-range device – is an S60 5th Edition device with a side-sliding full QWERTY keyboard featuring GSM/GPRS/EDGE/3G/3.5G, Wi-fi, Bluetooth, GPS, a 5 mega-pixel camera and a touchscreen.

The C6 is basically an N97 Mini packed in a cheaper casing. As a matter of fact, all three devices offer amazingly low prices for the features they pack, with estimated prices of 90, 180, and 220 Euros respectively.

Opera Mobile beta 10 claims to be “faster at rendering pages, zooming, panning and almost everything else you do with a browser. Page downloading is now 50% faster than the previous version of Opera for Symbian/S60 phones.”

In addition, it inlcudes speed dial, tabbed browsing, Opera Turbo, password manager, touch & keypad (for 5th edition devices), adaptive zooming, and AJAX support, among others.

Symbian smartphone users can head over to Opera’s full web site or visit http://m.opera.com/mobile/ on mobile to download Opera Mobile 10 beta right away.

Some screenshots of Opera Mobile running on the Nokia E90:

Welcome Screen, when you first launch Opera Mobile 10

Speed Dials

Mobility Nigeria homepage

Drop-down Menu. Back, Forward, Refresh icons all drop-down when you hit the menu button

Settings menu

It is like a game of cat-and-mouse. First, on the E90 communicator, once Gmail is setup, the messaging application simply goes into a comatose state. Getting anything done on it becomes next to impossible. My corporate mail works without issues, but once Gmail is configured…..

Installing Nokia Messaging seemed to help at first, and things went smoothly for just a while. Thereafter, the email application started acting like a possessed creature, and eventually went comatose again.

The E75, a much newer device, gave me the very same issues. Actually, this singular problem with Gmail informed my selling it just about a month after purchase. This is an official statement from Nokia on the issue:

We are aware of a Nokia Messaging issue that’s currently impacting Gmail and Google Apps email accounts. The problem is that sometimes email synchronizes to the device after a significant delay. Email synchronization will eventually resume automatically, but there’s currently no workaround available at this time. We are actively investigating this issue, and we are trying to resolve the problem as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconveniences this issue may cause.

Thank you,
Jeremiah Nielsen
Nokia Messaging
26-Aug-2009 07:57 PM
Source: Nokia Support Discussions: E75 reports (no messages) with Nokia Messaging Gmail account

To make matters worse, the built-in S60 browser on the E90 won’t load the Gmail webmail interface or its mobile version. So, here I am holding a smartphone that costs over N80, 000 on the market but can’t access Gmail on it at all.

Now, check this. My wife’s dumbphone, a pink Sony Ericsson W595, handles Gmail without any issues whatsoever! Is this sort of thing supposed to be happening? High-end smartphones acting dumb, and mid-tier dumbphones acting smart?

In order not to be unfair to smartphones in general, may I add that Gmail works flawlessly on all Android and Windows Mobile smartphones that I have used or tried out. This seems to be strictly a Symbian problem.

What am I supposed to think of all this?

Perhaps that is why I am so unimpressed with what I saw of version 8.65 for Symbian when I tried it out yesterday. For the purpose of information, Opera Mobile 8.65 is the stable version available for most devices. The newer version on steroids, version 9.5, is presently available for only a small range of devices, specifically on the Windows Mobile platform (small wonder too, Pocket Explorer sucks big time!!).

Anyway, Opera Mobile 8.65 simply reminds me of the teething days of the mobile web. Virtually ALL formatting is lost when browsing websites on this browser – font and layout inclusive.

Here are a few screenshots:

Comparison: On left, MobiNaija home on S60 Web; On right, same page on Opera Mobile 8.65

Alireta.com

Nairaland

Here are more features:

• 9,800km of routable map data
• Over 8,800 points of interest (POIs)
• Street maps for Lagos, FCT Abuja, Port Harcourt, Ibadan, Warri, and Ota amongst others
• Turn-by-turn voice prompts
• Route simulation: Ability to simulate route and view destination on map before embarking on the journey
• Weather forecast: Ability to check five day weather forecasts destinations and over 5000 cities worldwide
• Flight schedule and status: Access flight details for many major airlines
• Points of Interest dialing: Choose from over 8800 Points of Interest and call a point of interest (such as a restaurant or coffee shop) using the phone feature.
• Location messaging: Send a location message to another Nigerian mobile phone, detailing their exact location in GPS coordinates. If the receiving mobile phone also has Garmap For Mobile installed the message translates into a destination point and allows the receiver to navigate easily and quickly to that point.
• Panic button: Automatically fires off an urgent location message to up to three emergency contacts whenever the ‘#’ key is depressed for more than 3 seconds on certain Nokia and Samsung phones.
• “Panoramio”, a tool that allows consumers to access user-generated content that has been uploaded to the Web.
• On board user’s manual and troubleshooting information: The user’s manual and troubleshooting information sits on the application on your phone, so help is wherever you are.
• SD card and Installation disk: The application comes on a 2gig SD card and an installation / recovery disk
• 1.8 gig memory space: The application comes with 1.8gig free memory space on the SD card

The official distributor for Garmin in Nigeria, JEJ Engineering, says that the application is compatible with Windows Mobile (Pocket PC and Smart phone) and Symbian S60 devices with built-in GPS.

This really is interesting and good news. I’m looking forward to giving the application a spin and presenting a detailed review here. Watch this space.

Ozone is a world-class mobile browser that offers great performance and outstanding mobile browsing experience for S60 and UIQ based phones.

Ozone’s features make it one of the best in its class. From the open-source WebKit engine, Ozone not only delivers advanced features such as client-side database support, application cache, zooming and multiple windows, but also provides the best web-standards compliant experience that’s available.

* Intuitive UI and page navigation
* Multiple windows
* Zooming and panning
* Pop-up blocking
* Auto-complete URL editing
* Desktop/mobile mode switch
* Netscape scriptable plugin
* Low memory footprint, works in devices with only 64MB RAM
* Offline Web Applications support including the latest mobile Gmail for iPhone and Android

And more: high performance disk caching, fast image decoding, favorite icons, bookmark management and advanced HTML, CSS and JavaScript (SquirrelFish) support.

The browser, which is still an Alpha release, is available for Symbian s60 and UIQ devices.

Ozzone startpage

First Impressions
I did a quick run on the E90, and the interface is smooth and pleasant. I couldn’t login to the Facebook full website when I tried that, but the site was well rendered. heading for Yahoo, I was redirected to the yahoo mobile site. But the mobile re-direction did not work for Alireta.com and MobilityNigeria.com (another mobile browser for mobile web designers to worry about), but fortunately both sites have links that allow the user to force the mobile versions.

The application suddenly terminated itself while I was attempting to navigate a page on the MTN Nigeria website. But then, this sort of thing is to be expected from an Alpha release.

I’ll have a more detailed review as soon as I can squeeze the time.

Download from the [mobile] Ozone website.

But I am fast getting tired of what seems like Nokia’s inability or unwillingness to change with the times. Okay, they do change a bit, but they are not innovating fast enough. I am very particular about Nokia’s high-end offerings (mostly smartphones), so be sure to read my piece within that context.

1. Give us adequate RAM
What is the point of touting multi-tasking on a device when the user is just going to run into an “out of memory” error soon along the line?

I am not talking about some 4 year old phone, but recent releases like the 5800 XpressMusic and the embarassing flop, the N96.

2. Fix S60 UI Sluggishness
S60 has been known to be sluggish for years. Competing platforms are often snappier. And is there a sworn oath by Nokia executives to the effect that they must not authorise adequate processors for their devices?

For example, the N97 is already outdated before its release with a 3-year old processor. Compare the upcoming Samsung OmniaHD with that and you get the idea: a powerful, power-saving 600 MHz processor on an S60 device! Previews already refer to the snappy interface on the OmniaHD.

While Nokia sleeps and trundles on, it is very clear that the very first snappy Symbian S60 device in years will be the Samsung OmniaHD. Anyone wanna bet otherwise?

3. What is Nokia doing with Web?
I find it a contradiction that the Finnish boys have been marketing the mobile web on their devices since Adam, yet have one of the most sluggish web browsers in the smartphone world. Yes; S60 Web, with all its other capabilities, is sluggish and can be frustratingly slow at times. This may or may not be a fsallout of the underpowered processors that most Nokia smartphones are equipped with.

But whatever it is, having to be slowed down by my mobile web browser when I have a speedy 3.5G or WLAN connection is not endearing.

4. Nokia is stretching its resources in too many directions.
Yes; this has its advantages, as Nokia is able to sell different flavours of what is essentially one device to different people. But it does not look like it is helping Nokia channel the right proportions of resources into development and innovation.

5. Please fix “Download”
Download is the application on Nokia’s smartphones that is supposed to serve as an application store. I use the word “supposed” because, “Download” just doesn’t work. Plus, it is very user-unfriendly.

Nokia had years to improve this, but never did. Then Apple came along and worked wonders with its app store. Okay, Nokia, we will forgive you if you copy Apple again on this one. Just make it work.

6. S60 5th Edition UI is inconsistent
If you are going to copy, please copy right. Nokia’s S60 5th edition is a slight improvement on its older sibling, but having played with it a bit, i find certain inconsistencies in the interface.

At one level, you tap once to move to move to the next level of the menu. At others, you have to double-tap. Excuse me, but such inconsistencies can be disorienting to users.

I would have thought Nokia would adopt the now dead UIQ’s method. Tap to enter. Tap and hold to pop up an options menu. Works well.

7. Finally, Nokia seems to be going retro these days with internal memory.
Older smartphones had as much as 150mb internal disk, and many of Nokia’s new offerings provide much less. Think 5800 (80mb) or the E75 (50mb for a 2009 smartphone!), and the just announced E52 (60mb!).

What are the guys at Nokia thinking?

The majority of nokia’s smartphones are outdated before their release. Take the N97. This and other Nokia devices are already outgunned by many other competing devices from different manufaturers even before their releases (underpowered processors, outdated user interfaces, 3-year old camera specifications, meagre RAM and internal memory). No way!

It feels good to finally have my say on this. Samsung, LG, Apple and HTC are parading a nice array of mouth-watering devices, and I am beginning to feel like I am stuck in the stone age with Nokia’s latest efforts.

Sony Ericsson used to be my second port of call after Nokia, but they are clearly running on 4-year old steam pretty much the same as Nokia is.

This year, I will be shopping around a bit, and I have pencilled down the following devices from different manufacturers and platforms:

1. Palm Pre, running WebOS
2. Samsung i7500, running Android
3. Apple iPhone 3G, running Mac OS X
4. HTC Touch Pro, running WinMo
5. Whatever else catches my fancy

Who knows what manufacturer and OS platform I’ll be using as my primary device this time next year?

In the past, most navigation applications that run on GPS enabled devices didn’t come with support for Nigeria and that included the widely popular Google maps. But that has changed now with the release of the latest version (3.0.1.4) of Google maps for s60 devices.
Google maps loaded the map of Lagos when I launched it and it pinpointed my location.

Features like getting direction from your current location to a new location are currently not working, but we can expect that with further updates of the software more and more features will have support for Nigeria.

In case you are itching to see your street on your phone, move over to http://m.google.com on your s60 browser to download the software. And don’t forget to give us feedback of your experiences and impressions.

Download N86 (Solace)