Nokia: Please start again with your not-so-smartphones

With the exception of my first mobile phone at the age of 12, my heart was set on Nokia. Back then, growing up and living in a rural part of the English countryside, we had very little to occupy our minds. Anything new and shiny would be idolised as it momentarily distracted us from peeling potatoes.

When I was 15, I bought my first Nokia (series 60) phone, the 6600, which was a delight to use and added an air of faux professionalism to my final secondary school year. But this is where it started going rapidly downhill like a soapbox racer without any brakes.

Since then we have succumbed to expecting more from our handheld phone. It isn't just a means of communication between two people but a multi-function device which keeps track of where we are, where we should be and who to see while we're there, the news, the weather, keeping us entertained and communications unified. The key to my current frustrations is the latter; keeping my contacts, email and calendar synchronised.

I was sent a Nokia E55 to play with by a London PR firm representing the mobile phone manufacturer. The hardware looks and feels good, but isn't anything particularly special. (In all honesty, the device doesn't fit into the hand very well, the battery cover keeps coming off and feels scratchy, and in the dark the keypad lights show through the spaces between the buttons). The software on the other hand is an absolute let down and negates the "smart" in "smartphone".

Running Symbian OS 9.3, the user interface is clean and to the point. The design works well and is pleasing on the eye. And to be honest, that single line of positivity is like squeezing blood out of a stone. To ease the burden of reading a lengthy post ripping this Nokia phone to pieces, I will attempt to at least make it into the third round of a metaphorical boxing match.

• Instead of pausing for a second to load an application all in one go, it will load up an application a bit at a time, although still within a three-second time frame.
• When accessing menus or changing the screen, for a split second the previous screen and the loading screen will overlap. This is visually obvious and looks confusing - causing your eyes to jump around the screen looking at what's going on.
• It is not clear whether an icon is a folder with menu items in or an application in its own right.
• The operating system menus, text and user interface is very low resolution for what it should be capable of (seen below).

• When viewing gallery features, video or picture thumbnails, they have worked on making it flow and transition when frankly the average user couldn't care less. This just makes it look like it runs slowly and you just want to select the image you want to view and full-screen it.
• For a business phone with a compact-QWERTY keyboard, half of the features are multimedia and personal based applications. This makes an effort to bridge the gap between business and personal use, but a business phone should be a business phone and nothing else.

I keep discovering entirely pointless features in this phone; features almost en par with those of the 8800 Carbon Arte's "tap violently on the screen" feature. Last night in bed when attempting to take a photo of my partner dribbling in her sleep (with the hilarious consequences of intending to upload this to Facebook), as I lay on my side the phone's display rotated 90°. What's the point in that? The answer to this, is that there is no point in that.

In my opinion, the weeks spent on the development of this feature to enable the rotation of all the menus 90° was hopelessly wasted.

And the nail in the coffin for Nokia is the email functionality. They cut out the BlackBerry Connect software from some and not all phones for a clear yet confounding reason, and some phones have Mail for Exchange whereas others have it combined with Nokia's own messaging system, Nokia Messaging.

Whichever way I try and hook up my university email to Nokia Messaging, it just won't have it. If I had the two separate systems mentioned above, it wouldn't be a problem as my email works with both. But I don't, and after several hours of configuring and tweaking, the end result was a failure.

The only way I can describe the email capabilities of all Nokia phones (those I have played with in person, but as a result of my experiences can be spread out to those I haven't) is genuinely exhausting.

If Nokia continues along this path of creating operating systems which are slow, sluggish, tiresome and exhausting to use, then God only knows what will happen when they team up with Microsoft to bring Office to their devices. The combination alone would cause the hardware to simply melt in the hand of the end user.

If by some strange coincidence you have had a positive experience with your Nokia phone, by all means tell me about it. I won't believe you, I'm afraid, but it's still nice to share.