Nokia 770: The Good, Bad and Ugly

Nokia's new 770 has interested me ever since Nokia announced it many months ago. My main interest is in how the 770 is a very specialized device rather than a general purpose PDA or Smartphone. The latter tend to suffer from the usual "does everything but not that well" syndrome. I'm a big fan of specialized devices because the engineers tend to do a much better job of supporting the device's specialty much better than the same feature on a multipurpose device.

The 770's specialities are web browsing and email on a relatively small device.



The Good
From a user experience point of view, the engineers realized that one cannot display web pages on a small device, so they incorporated a Full Screen button as well as Zoom In/Out buttons. These work very well and quickly. The stylus is used on the touch screen to pan the display over a zoomed-in page. There is also a handy Back button. This is a considerably better user experience for web browsing and reading email than on a PDA or smartphone.

The graphical user interface is optimized for a simple usage model; things you need frequently are displayed as easy to access icons and a single menu is used for less frequent commands. Also very nice.

The Bad
Despite the nice general UI layout, the engineers forgot to address some key features; mainly in the mail application.

When reading a message, one must use the cascading menu to delete the message; even though there is plenty of sceen real estate for a Delete icon?! When you do manage to delete a message, you are always asked if you want to delete the message only on the 770 or on both the 770 and the server. Now, how many users even know what that means? How many users will be annoyed by the constant need to reply to that damned dialog?! Nokia engineers need to read About Face by Alan Cooper. They need to revist the user experience for IMAP email...

The Mail app has trouble displaying many HTML email messages; these are so common that there is no excuse for not being able to render them properly.

The Ugly
The Browser crashes a bit too often.

The responsiveness of the 770 is quite sluggish.

Nice First Try
I congratulate Nokia for taking the time to design a nicely specialized internet/email device. They've already distributed a software update at the end of Dec. Hopefully they'll fix some of the bugs quickly in the next update.