Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/27/nokia_e61i_motorola_q9h_headtohead/
The Revenge of the BlackBerry killers?
Putting the Nokia E61i and Motorola Q9H head to head
Posted in Mobile, 27th August 2007 07:02 GMT
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Review To say that I find BlackBerry-type phones unappealing is an understatement. So the prospect of using two of these phones was about as attractive as cleaning the wax out of my left ear by sticking a knitting needle through my right ear.
Why? For me, the BlackBerry form factor seems to be the worst of all worlds, highlighting product designers' total lack of imagination. When the designers insist on putting keyboard and screen on the same surface they compromise both: neither the keyboard nor the screen are as good as they could be. Not to mention that these monsters are unwieldy - like putting a saucer to your head - and terminally uncool. Can you imagine anyone holding one of these up in the air at a gig to take a picture? Thought not. Then there's the whole business of "CrackBerry addiction"...
For now, however, the business market has little choice but to look seriously at phones with this design.
But over the past year, RIM has gone from strength to strength, and is now joined by two heavyweight rival platforms: Nokia, and for the first time, Windows Mobile backed by serious Tier 1 vendors. This head-to-head weighs up the best of each of the new contenders - Nokia's E61i and Motorola's new Q9 phone. I looked at this from a user's perspective of getting the job done, rather than a Megahertz battle, for a full month each (and as a sanity check, I also tried to perform the same tasks on Nokia's 9300i Communicator).
The results might surprise you. They surprised me...
The discomfort factor
How did the E61i and Q9 shape up, literally? Nokia launched its first BlackBerry clone, the E61 a year ago, and the 'i' successor appeared this spring. Although the hardware and software remains essentially the same - the E61i adds a camera, takes MicroSD rather than MiniSD, and uses the thin and very breakable new Nokia charging connector - it feels much thinner.
In fact, this is a matter of perception, as it's only 0.1mm thinner, but the cleaner edges and superior build quality (no squeaks, here) are part of a stronger, cleaner design.
Motorola's Q9 makes it feel like a giant, however. It's slightly narrower and even thinner. While you can't disguise the fact that the Q9 is a Blackberry-type phone, it easily wins the battle of the shirt pocket.
Making a call
Curiously for devices with a QWERTY keyboard, both contenders use a one-handed phone interface designed for simple numeric keypad phones, rather than optimize a PDA-style inferface. Nokia's contender uses S60, while Motorola's uses Windows Mobile 6 Smartphone. That means both UIs leave the user bereft of even the most basic shortcuts, such as "Ctrl-S" for Save, which really makes them struggle when using sophisticated applications.
For the simplest tasks however, it isn't long before a winner emerges. Motorola's Q9 makes its home screen, or "Standby" in Nokia lingo, accessible with one keystroke, while Nokia's generally takes two. From here, punching in any substring from the name of the contact you wish to dial brings up a list of matches instantaneously, along with the number in numerical form. Nokia's S60 requires you to start the Contacts application manually, and it doesn't do loose substring matches. In real life, I was placing a call within five seconds on the Q9 from a cold start, but the E61i couldn't do the job in less than 10 seconds, and on average took 15-20 seconds.
(A miraculous piece of software called QiX (http://www.zicorp.com/Qix.htm) from Zi Corporation does this job for S60 phones, but unfortunately it's only sold to carriers and handset vendors - and not to us punters.)
Our "control" device, the Nokia 9300i, was a little creaky compared to the instantaneous Motorola. However, it was much better at finding contacts than the newer, but inferior S60 contacts book. The optimised S80 interface, with its helpful "CBA" (Command Button Area) side buttons, comes into its own when making conference calls or switching between calls. The combination of idiot-friendly labelled buttons and sparse, unfussy dialogs makes the 9300i one of the easiest phones to use.
Motorola 9/10, Nokia 4/10; Ye Olde Communicator: 8/10
Sending a message
Similarly, the Q9 beat the E61i hands down for speed in sending a text message, as you perform the same steps from the Home screen as you do sending a message (in fact you need just one extra keystroke). In this situation it had an added advantage, with a superbly implemented text recognition system. I'm disappointed to see that Nokia refuses to implement a list of recent text recipients (regular Motorola and Sony Ericsson phones have featured this for ages), but some serious thought needs to be done here, Nokia. On a one-handed interface with just two softkeys (one of which is used to go back, or cancel an operation), it's logical to force the user to go through a number of steps to "Add recipient...", and so on. On a richer QWERTY interface it makes no sense at all.
And the 9300i? It's now showing its age, taking far longer than either of the newcomers to bring up a new window. However the speed of the contact book search, the task-optimized "CBT" buttons along the side of the screen, and the name completion, make texting a breeze.
Motorola 9/10, Nokia 4/10; Ye Olde Communicator: 7/10
Call quality
As you'd expect, Nokia's call quality is first class. While the Motorola exhibited some distortion where there's poor reception (for example, on O2 in my kitchen) it's a marked improvement on previous Windows Mobile devices I've used. As it should be, given Motorola's pedigree in radio engineering. Both phones performed creditably on Loudspeaker. Only with calls over Bluetooth was the Nokia advantage really apparent.
One annoyance of the Q9 was that it seems to spend an inordinately long time telling you the call has finished, and the dialog isn't particularly clear that you have in fact hung up. Here our control phone walked away with the laurels, however, as its long, thin design has allowed the engineers to build in the best possible internal antenna.
Motorola 7/10, Nokia 9/10; Ye Olde Communicator: 10/10
Keyboard and Usability
The keyboard has to be the most improved part of the Q9 over last year's original Q. It has a firm, clicky action in comparison to the squidgy feel of the E61i. It's the best of any BlackBerry-type device I've used. As several reviewers have pointed out, the E61i introduces a quite unnecessary design flaw to the range: the left softkey is so squidgy it often doesn't press first time.
Both BlackBerry clones suffer from eccentric Capitalitis, too. You can never quite tell when entering text into a field whether the phone will decide to capitalise the first letter. Of course this isn't a problem on the "control" phone, the ancient communicator.
The use of a one-handed interface also means that both the E61i and Q9 are harder work than they should be. Windows Mobile menu options are numerically numbered, which is ideal for numeric keypad phones (except when the numbers change depending on context, as they do, infuriatingly, in Opera). The ancient 9300i supported multiple levels of zoom, giving it an advantage over the two more modern devices: and for advanced users, almost every menu option has a shortcut key. The BlackBerry clones could certainly use some work.
Curiously, both BlackBerry-style devices shared a similar annoyance. Motorola's manual advises you to use the "Hang Up" key to cancel menu options. But if you hold this a fraction of a second too long - and it's quite sensitive - the phone turns off. I experienced similar behaviour with the E61i, as the on/off key doubles as a profile switcher and keypad lock. Over a month this happened perhaps half a dozen times with each device.
Text entry:Motorola 6/10, Nokia 4/10; Ye Olde Communicator: 7/10
Task management (basics):Motorola 7/10; Nokia 4/10; Ye Olde Communicator: 8/10
Task management (advanced): Motorola 5/10; Nokia 5/10; Ye Olde Communicator: 7/10
Corporate email
Now to the real battleground: push email. Microsoft has targeted RIM for destruction, and has made great efforts to enhance its ActiveSync software and build features that require dedicated BlackBerry servers into Windows Server. Since the Q9 uses Windows Mobile 6, it can take advantage of such features as remote wipe, where the IT department can zap a lost or stolen phone, or global address list. Out of the box, Nokia offers its Mail For Exchange client, which offers the bare minimum of features with some heavy caveats (with v1.x, don't leave more than a few (>500) message in your inbox, according to the README).
For better compatibility with Microsoft Exchange, Nokia users will need to get hold of DataViz's RoadSync. The S60 client could use a bit of a polish, I find, and will set you back $49.
Scoring the relative merits is a bit silly here: if you want to run Good or Blackberry Connect, it'll cost you more for the third-party license fees. Which you may then save elsewhere. But there's no doubt that if you're already running Exchange and want to implement mobile push email, the Q9 is the strongest candidate in the market.
Internet email
In comparing the mail suite from these two heavyweight contenders, I did at times think that sticking a knitting needle through my brain might be less painful. Despite the addition of a "Wizard", Nokia makes setting up an account unnecessarily tedious: you need to return deep into the menu structure to fill out the fields the Wizard didn't ask you for, like er... the password. Nor could I fetch email from multiple accounts at once with the E61i. The Q9 does. It comfortably wins this part of the comparison, not least because of its excellent keyboard. Again, the clarity of the ClearType font rendering and the excellent word prediction made the Motorola feel like a modern device. The E61i, incredibly, couldn't display HTML messages correctly - something its old S80 does with ease.
However, serious bugs in each of these caused me problems. The Nokia IMAP client is fundamentally broken: it won't fetch the message bodies from a Zimbra server. And after a week of writing quick replies to colleagues and friends from the Q9, I noticed I was getting some exasperated emails in return. It turned out that my replies were still sitting in my Outbox. Turning off SSL seemed to fix this, but isn't a secure solution. Speed wise, the E61i's Wi-Fi is a serious advantage over the Q9 for large fetches, but the advantage is nullified if you're using push, or regular fetches, and your device is more or less always up to date.
Our control device is now showing its age: it was fine pulling down email on WLAN networks, but with no 3G it's best left to trickle collect it in the background. However, one huge practical advantage was being able to see more than one email at a time - and the device has enough stability and memory to keep these around.
The conclusion? Microsoft and Nokia need to produce more reliable and scalable smartphone email software, but the Windows Mobile implementation was far less of a chore.
Motorola 8/10; Nokia 4/10; Ye Olde Communicator: 5/10
Calendar and Tasks
It's at this stage of the comparison that I had to pinch myself I wasn't in the Philip K Dick novel, where time goes backwards. Was the E61i's S60 Feature Pack 1 really the most modern PDA software Nokia could manage? Here the control device came in useful as a reality check. On the 9300i, it was a breeze to setup multiple to do lists. You can colour-code tasks and appointments, and set the place where you want your tasks to go in your daily calender view - a great feature.
On the Motorola, it wasn't immediately clear that one could create tasks at all - although they can be assigned to pre-defined categories. The one-handed UI made filtering cumbersome, while the E61i's creaky tasks facility doesn't even allow you to do this at all.
Motorola Q9 users should arm themselves with AgendaOne or Papyrus (I preferred the speed and clarity of the former). E61i owners can buy a port of Papyrus that I found too slow to be usable, and a dysfunctional application called Aqua Calender.
Overall, both are sorry apologies for a real PDA, although the Windows device offers the most. To Nokia's shame the E61i requires the end user who isn't attached to a corporate mail system to go out and buy their own messaging application and calender. While lacking a "Today" screen, the 9300i wins this part of the comparison hands down.
Which is remarkable, considering the software hasn't really been touched since 2001. And it shouldn't even be here in our round-up. Maybe time really is going backwards?
: Motorola 5/10; Nokia 2/10; Ye Olde Communicator: 9/10
Document handling
One of the smartest decisions Motorola made in the Q9 was licensing the best applications available for the phone, rather than Microsoft's default bundle. This means Opera is the standard browser (with its dedicated browser key), and DataViz's Documents To Go is the default office documents application.
Since last year, Nokia has dropped the old Psion software which it failed to invest in so it was up to date, in favour of QuickOffice. Documents To Go is far richer, while E61i owners are invited to upgrade (ie, hand over more dosh) for a version of QuickOffice that matches the DataViz suite. On opening an RTF file, last year's Nokia E61 sends you to the Notepad, where in a massive font you can view something that looks like ...
{\rtf\mac\ansicpg10000\cocart824\cocoasubrtf410 {fonttbl\f0 ...
... you get the picture.
To be honest, working with attachments in each of these isn't very nice, because that one handed UI makes editing a chore. The word processor forces you to switch between select mode and edit mode, which is incredibly tedious. And it's the rich UI that saves the ancient word processor in the Communicator from a low mark for compatibility.
Motorola 7/10; Nokia 5/10; Ye Olde Communicator: 7/10
The Web
This part of the comparison pitted Opera on Windows Mobile, on HSDPA, against Nokia's own Safari-based browser on WLAN or a regular 3G connection. As it turned out, neither experience matched up to browsing on a larger device (say a Windows or Palm PDA) although Opera won by a nose. Although it felt like peering through a letterbox at times, with its ability to display a web-page in one, rapidly scrollable column, and ability to open multiple windows quickly and easily, Opera allowed you to find and read web material with ease. Until it adds a single-column mode, Nokia's browser is merely demoware with great potential.
Once I downloaded Opera for the E61i, I was able to browse much more comfortably. I did notice some unnerving pauses on both browsers, however, and one Opera crash forced a reboot, produced a core dump, and wiped out my Bookmarks.
Alas, the control device's browser, an old version of Opera, was just as frustrating as it ever has been. The old, slow processor struggled on anything more than the simplest pages. The 9300i did run Opera Mini adequately, once you had got used to the inverted orientation of the buttons.
Motorola 6/10; Nokia 3/10; Ye Olde Communicator: 1/10
Power management
For a device that's basically just a dirty great big battery with a phone wrapped around it, it's no wonder the Nokia E61i marches off with this part of the head-to-head. Symbian was designed for low power, and Nokia's engineers haven't squandered the inheritance. Even with WLAN constantly active I could get through half a working week without having to go near the charger. The 1500mAh battery is thinner than last year's, and naturally delivers more power than Motorola 1100mAh battery.
But the Q9 impressed, and given that Windows Mobile has a terrible reputation for power management, Motorola appears to have tamed the beast. Intensive calling, a couple of hours of music playback, and email set for hourly checks still saw me through the day with a couple of bars left. There are a couple of spots that need work, though. Push email and Opera both murder the Q9 - you really have to make sure you exit the browser - but setting email to fetch regularly saves a lot of power.
It would be unfair to make too much of the 9300i's incredible uptime - the best of the bunch on a 1200mAh battery - as it's not a 3G model.
Motorola 6/10; Nokia 9/10; Ye Olde Communicator: 10/10
Multimedia
While Nokia segments its target markets carefully, and cripples its devices accordingly, its rivals don't feel so constrained. Motorola, like Sony Ericsson, seems determined to prove that a dull business phone can double up as your primary music player. The inclusion of A2DP wireless stereo in the Q9 was very welcome. The close integration between Windows Media Player 11 also helped, as the PC software automatically downsizes video clips for playback on the phone. Both devices have passable cameras. Moto gives the music player and camera dedicated buttons.
Motorola 8/10; Nokia 5/10; Ye Olde Communicator: 1/10
The Bonus ball?
The E61i earns an honorable mention for being the only one here whose firmware is upgradeable from home. But no comparison would be fair without mentioning one special feature the E61i brings with it: VoIP calling. Nokia has integrated a SIP stack with hooks into the Symbian OS power management, so WLAN calling takes up very little power. It's also integrated it right into the UI - so you can set the phone to make all calls VoIP calls by default. Setting up a service such as Truphone or AQL can be done in 10 minutes - at which point the phone really starts to pay for itself. Equally, it can integrate into your office VoIP PBX.
Award the E61i a bonus 10, here.
"Hi! I'm a PC! ... Hi! I'm a Mac!"
Not too surprisingly, the Q9 scores highest with Windows integration. ActiveSync, which is now built into Vista, allows you to browse the device easily, sets up a Sync folder, and has that tight integration with WMP. Nokia has significantly improved its Mac support in recent months, and the E61i (and even the 9300i) now syncs via cable or Bluetooth with Mac OS X's iCal and Address Book. A separate application which recently entered public beta, Nokia MultiMedia Transfer, adds iPhoto and iTunes integration.
Q9-toting Mac users will need MarkSpace's Missing Sync 4.0 for Windows Mobile 6.0 support - but it's a mature product that once installed, gives you the transcoding and folder sync features of ActiveSync for the PC.
Motorola 9/10; Nokia 7/10; Ye Olde Communicator: 6/10
Conclusion
Although Microsoft gave up on the mass market phone long ago, after Stinger, it plugs away at the messaging niche dominated by RIM. With the Q9, Motorola has produced the first Windows Mobile phone that knocks out a Nokia rival for usability, performance and ease of use. Tot up the scores here, and the Q9 wins 92 to 75, and that includes a generous 10 point advantage for Nokia's SIP integration. I didn't score the corporate mail comparison, so if you're an Exchange shop that lead extends even further.
Nokia E61i, Motorola Q9 and 9300 Communicator compared
Nokia's bonus is that it does VoIP, Motorola's is that it's an excellent music and video player. It's just a shame neither of them can match the old Communicator as a PDA, or for real ease of use: the 9300i scores an 86.
My hunch is that we'll see more devices like the Palm Folio or Datawind that fill this niche, as a "phone companion". The big phone manufacturers don't seem to be able to do it themselves, nor do they have any incentive to; hence the relentless propaganda about "convergence". That may be wishful thinking on my part, of course, but a significant part of the business market remains poorly served. ®