I remember rotary dials with immense fondness. I used to play with them all the time as a child. What a sensual and whimsical interface. The first push-botton phones were much more efficient of course, but they took all the quirkiness and poetry out of the dialing experience.
Fast forward a few decades. The first mobile phone I ever used was provided to me by my employer. It was a simple, no-nonsense Nokia phone. I had never used one before. At first glance, here was an efficient but boring descendent of those boring old push-button land-line phones. But first impressions can be deceiving.
It turns out I was wowed. Not by the ability to call from anywhere (still somewhat of a novelty in those days) but by the user interface (UI). Despite the small black & white screen and limited functionality, I was amazed by the simplicity, the consitency and the ingenuity of the UI. In fact, I even remember feeling that there was something nearly magical about it. The phone seemed to always be a step ahead of me, as if it were somehow reading my mind and anticipating my every thought. The option I needed was always ready to invoke, assigned to one of the two « function buttons ». Even more impressive, the function seemed to always be assigned to the same button. So it seemed that whatever I needed to do always simply required pressing the same button a few times.
Oh, and I just loved the T9 predictive text entry system that so many people seem to hate (& tx 2 whm da wrtten wrd wil soon b unreedble 4 old frts like me. C id m an fran c).
Since then, I’ve owned a couple of pretty basic Nokia phones. No camera, no garage-door opener, no built-in usb-powered electric nose-hair trimmer. My current 6100 (I hate their model-naming scheme!) has a color screen, but the same good old UI. I’ve played around briefly with other phones on occasion, some of them chock full of snazzy features, but the fact is that I’d be loath to switch to any other brand. I couldn’t possibly be unfaithful to the people who went to the care and trouble of designing that brilliant UI.
While I realize that many, if not most people don’t really mind bad or mediocre design, or at least seem to believe they are an unavoidable fact of life, I have met a lot of Nokia-faithful, whose loyalty was earned through the UI.
But maybe my loyalty is misplaced. Maybe Nokia doesn’t care about good UI design and just stumbled on a good design by accident. After all, I can’t find any info or bragging about their UI on their site. Yet I’m willing to bet it wasn’t an accident, and I believe, for no good reason, that the Symbian OS-based UI on their higher-end multimedia phones can’t possibly be bad. How stupid is that? I don’t know.
Why? Well, the reason I felt like posting about this is that I recently called my faith into question (as a matter of principle). So I thought I’d surf around and try to find out more about the UI’s of higher-end Nokia phones and of other phone manufacturers. And I came up with pretty-much nothing. Just disjointed bits and scraps of info. There are many sites out there that review and compare phones in excruciating detail, yet none of them go out of their way to systematically review the UIs, let alone compare them accross brands or models.
Basically, the (flip) phone must consciously or unconsciously remind the (nerdy) reviewer of Captain Kirk’s communicator. The fact that it might take 17 key presses to get Scotty on the line is mostly overlooked (even though it means the Klingons have enough time to disintegrate Kirk before Scotty can beam him up).
I’d love to provide such a side-by-side phone UI comparison service, but it would require every phone manufacturer to lend me their phones. Right.
Given Apple’s track record in UI design, I’d surely give their rumored iPhone a serious look, if it materializes one day. In the meantime, I’m getting close to being able to upgrade my phone for little or no money. I’ll probably be eligible for all those high-end net-surfing, TV streaming online multimedia features, but these services are so outrageously priced by the mobile telcos in France, that I’d rather not be tempted by having access to them on my phone.
All I want is something as cool and useful as that super-elegant, spookily prescient Nokia UI, (and maybe Bluetooth connectivity so I can save my address book onto my Mac). If I can’t get that with a new make or model, then I probably won’t upgrade at all. The problem is I have pretty much no way of knowing what the UI will be like in advance.