A bar towards the top of the screen can present shortcuts of your key contacts as fast access buttons. Images can be attached, and dabbing these buttons pulls up a thread showing headers for up to six recent calls or messages, sent or received, plus buttons for making calls and sending messages. You can also allocate two RSS feeds to the entries in the Contacts bar, so you can quickly get online updates from social networking sites and blogs relevant to them. It’s a neat set-up that’s handy if you have a few regular contacts you want to stay up to date with.
Use the Contacts Bar for social networking
Nokia also includes the option to replace the Contacts bar with a more conventional row of four shortcut icons, or ditch both for a clean screen.
Getting to grips with the touch system won't take long, and anyone already up to speed with S60 will recognise certain familiar structures and traits within the 5800’s menu and navigation set-up. Click the main menu button, for instance, and you get the usual grid of a dozen app icons. Throughout the menu system, two buttons at the bottom of the display do the work of conventional soft-menu keys.
For sub-menus where you need to scroll to see all the choices, a scroll bar appears, which can be dragged down to whizz to the end more quickly than finger-swiping down the list will get you there. We found the screen generally offered ample room for using fingers to select buttons and most menu options. The screen is fairly responsive, and scrolling down lists is speedy and hassle free.
For text input - notes as well as messaging - the 5800 pulls up a regular numberpad, although this can be switched into a full-width, landscape-oriented Qwerty keyboard, or a mini-Qwerty layout which can be used in either orientation. Although the latter option is best tapped with the 5800's stylus, the other two keypads are sensibly laid out and provide plenty of space for fingers.
Spinal Tap-tap-tap?
We’d like the 5800's accelerometer - it does have one - used to automatically switch between the numberpad and the full Qwerty keyboard layout as almost all other touchphones do. The accelerometer is used for some media apps, such as the picture viewer. For those who prefer scrawling to tapping, Nokia has included an additional handwriting recognition option too.
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COMMENTS
S60 is not for touch
The whole point of the iphone is that you DON'T have to unlearn and relearn anything!! Their interface is something called 'intuitive'. New word.
Okay, I'm being an idiot and confrontational.
But my point is this, S60 has _mainly_ been used for non-touch phones over the years. Not only that, but S60 is not as user friendly as it might be. It's not bad, but it's not amazing either. It's just what we've all gotten used to over the years because it's all we've really had for smart phones. Other than winmo of course and lets not talk about that.
Your points above seem to suggest that somehow MS and other companies don't change because they are scared their users won't be able to use their new interfaces....I don't think that is the case at all. There are many reasons they don't change stuff too much (see vista) but they always want to improve user experience as much as possible. Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 anyone?
When folks bought the iphone did you hear anyone complaining about how it didn't look or behave like their previous phone OS? Because all I heard was people saying how much easier to use it is and what a relief it was that someone had made such a decent job of it.
Surely then if Nokia released an updated OS designed specifically for touch that was AS good or....wait for it....even BETTER that Apples attempt then surely people would be shouting about how brilliant it is - not how it's familiar it is. Familiar is only normally quoted as an advantage when people move to an OS that is even worse than the one they're currently using. For instance, when users moved from a Nokia to Samsung or Motorola (Samsung/Motorola being unfamiliar but not better and possibly harder to use than Nokia).
Yes S60 (the front end to Symbian?) is good but its nowhere near as good as it could be. Don't stay in the past, innovate and improve things even if it means users have to be happier with their new 'difficult to learn' OS. Which wouldn't be the case actually would it because if it was difficult to learn it would be any good, would it.
Yes Nokia is a big ship that turns like an Oil Tanker which is why I'm so grateful to apple (as much as I dislike the way they do business) because it it wasn't for them we'd all still be using 6310i's or K810i. Funnily enough Apple is also a very large company (at least in terms of revenue) but still manage to produce great _new_ (in every sense of the word) products.
Facts are important
Bill, you don't know which foot to stand on except that you are obviously anti-Symbian. Most importantly Symbian was the first mobile OS that supported touchscreen; in fact the first Symbian device ever had touchscreen, and the first Symbian phone ever, back in 1999, the Ericsson R380, also had touch screen. So your notion of 'bolted-on' is simply nonsense. And then you opten for non-touch screen anway so it's blur what you're getting at.
In terms of innovations, if you except the iPhone UI, i can't right now think of any new phone innovation that wasn't launched on a Symbian device before any other OS, and there is no reason to believe that this is not going to continue.
Nokia has chosen to make the 5800 and N97 touch screen UIs familiar to their existing S60 user base, which is most widely used in the marketplace. I would say that's a very wise move; the worst thing they could do now is to come up with something fancy demanding massive unlearning and relearning.
The user compatibility is rightly far more a concern for Nokia than binary compatibility.
Wise move to continue with S60 on Symbian for touch screen phones
Contrary to the above commentator, I think it's the wisest move by Nokia to base the new touch screen phones (5800, N97 etc) on the S60. This will make it familiar to the largest phone user community in the world. It's far better than, for the sake of 'innovation', come up with something different.
I would think it's far more a concern for Nokia to be compatible with its large user base, than being worried about binary compatibility, which is really a non-issue.
Some other factual errors of the above commentator should also be pointed out. Symbian was designed for touch-screen from the outset, it's not something bolted on. The first Symbian device ever, back in 1996, was a touch screen device and the very first Symbian phone, the Ericsson R380, was a touch screen device.
I would also argue that far more innovations have been first launched on a Symbian phone than any other OS in the market.
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