Phone phunctionality

My Nokia 7650 is OK, y’know. It takes photos, has a calendar, full contacts list, WAP, polyphonic ringtones, SMS/MMS, Bluetooth, infra red, Java, GPRS, wallpapers, joystick nav, and of course Snake II. In fact, it’s pretty much a computer more than a phone. And that’s a problem. The more it behaves like a computer, the more I expect it to behave like a computer, and the more it behaves like a computer. For every advanced feature added, I increasingly expect to be able to do certain things.

So, I expect to be able to select text and copy it to a clipboard, for pasting elsewhere. This would be very useful around messaging, adding contacts etc. It’s text! There’s a joystick. Can’t I grab some text and use it?

I expect to be able to add the phone number that an incoming SMS text message emanates from to my Contacts list. I can’t. I can only add phone numbers associated with phone calls, not texts. This is due to them being two entirely separate architectures/protocols, I would imagine. However, the presentation of both is so similar, I expect the behaviours I can associate with such data to be the same.

It now crashes too. Occasionally. But should a phone ever crash? It can also get inordinately slow, presumably due to the fact that I’m clogging up the RAM with 100s of images. However, there are certain functions (for me, voice call and text functionality) which should take precedence somehow.

The SMS text user dictionary seems to forget over time too. Has anyone else noticed this about Nokia phones? You can teach the dictionary a word, and if you use that word frequently enough, it stays in the predictive text user scratchpad. However, if you don’t use it continually, the word disappears. Now I quite like the idea of making computers forget – that appeals theoretically – but surely the advantage of such devices is that they don’t forget. Perhaps the phone is overwriting user dictionary space with images, writing new images on to the spaces occupied by infrequently used words. But surely it should make that clear to me, and give me the option to override? Perhaps that would be an example of a seamful system [PDF] – to make clear the rules the system is operating under, such that I can a) learn that and comprehend it, and b) take control.

So, the more my phone becomes like a computer, the more it inherits some bad traits (crashing, slowing down as it tries to do too much) and the more I expect certain behaviours (any text to be cut and paste-able; consistency of content objects i.e. a phone number is a phone number with certain inherited characteristics and functions). I guess we’ll see a backlash towards phones that are just extremely good at voice calls and texts and that’s it. I believe Xelibri are introducing a phone which is just that – deliberately limited. Or rather, focused.

This isn’t a reflection on Nokia – no one can deny they have something to say about making phones. Just the trend within products towards complexity, with all the good and bad that entails.

Now if only I knew someone who was about to go work for Nokia …