Readers of this blog might have noticed that i have become a bit of a mobile phone freak over the past few weeks (or is it months?). Well.. yes. It might have started with my purchase of the Nokia N95 over a year ago and my fascination with the iPhone which goes back to the day when Steve Jobs demonstrated Apple’s first phone on 9 January 2007. Before that, my relation to mobile phones was pretty cold. I had my Nokia 6210 for years and didn’t mind that all my younger colleagues had the latest models in their hands.

As I’ve written a few days ago, October 2nd should have been an exciting day for the mobile industry. Nokia, the No.1 mobile phone maker unveiled their first touch screen phone in the post iPhone era: the 5800 XpressMusic. So how did it go?

If you are looking for a quick overview and feature list of the new Nokia device this is the WRONG blog post to read. Instead head over to All About Symbian’s overview of the 5800.

If you are in for an extremely long-winded overview of how a good part of MY October 2nd was spent in the mobile world, then be my guest. I will throw in some Middle East social observations, some user interface design, branding and marketing insights and some technology critiques for your reading pleasure (or torture). YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

In the beginning there was Batman..

It is in powerful product placements like these where the myth creation begins. The XpressMusic 5800, also known as the “Tube” was also called the Batman phone. Anyone who has seen The Dark Knight know what important role that phone played in the story.

Being the Nokia’s first touch screen phone in the modern era, created extra anticipation: the Nokia empire is striking back.

My October 2nd mobile marathon started with a trip to one of the many (many MANY) mobile shops in Amman’s 7th Circle district. One thing I keep noticing whenever I drive by that area is a mobile shop called “Globalization” (eat your hearts out, all you anti-globalization activists!).

I was looking for a new battery cover for my N95, which was broken and stuck to the phone with a strip of adhesive tape. Very appropriate for a phone that a year ago cost up to US$ 700 is was considered last year’s “flagship” model. I won’t launch into Nokia bashing just yet (you can scroll down for that) but every time I see my N95’s chipped metalic paint and cheap plastics I just feel cheated by Nokia. For Globalization’s sake! The Chinese manage to make 40 Dollar Rolex fakes that are, to most people, indistinguishable from the real thing. Why didn’t Nokia make the original N95 a piece of industrial art and design? It defies understanding. (or is it simple greed?).

Maybe they like the profit margins on those replacement battery covers. The first shop I visited claimed they are selling original Nokia covers. For JD 10. A piece of plastic which costs no more that maybe 5 cents to make is sold for JD 10 (US$ 14). This is literally like printing money! After visiting a few shops I convinced the guy from the first shop to sell to to me for JD 8.

But man.. forget about the damn cover. This visit to Amman’s mobile shops was the best preparation for the rest of my Nokia-filled evening.

The N96: just what the boss needs.

These small shops are amazing. Whatever phone you read about in Engadget, those guys have it. One of the small mobile shops was packed with people, eager to spend their holiday gift money on the latest mobiles displayed in the glass showcases.

Among the devices displayed was the first iPhone 3G I’ve ever seen live. Price tag: JD 800 (US$ 1126). But to hell with the iPhone 3G. The Ramadan holiday phone is the Nokia N96, baby. Being my ignorant and out-of-touch self, I was actually startled to see it on display in every shop I entered.

The phones are something to admire. But their buyers are something else!

One customer, a slightly overweight young man, dressed in a suit without a tie, stood at the counter. His gaze was intensely fixated on a shiny new N96. He was talking in an equally intense tone into a phone pressed onto his ear with someone, maybe his boss, a certain Abu Isam.

“Abu Isam, sir, yes it is the latest model. It looks fearsome” (In Arabic: “شكله بخوف“)
“…”
“Yes sir. I am looking at it now in front of me. The latest model. Fearsome. It looks fearsome, Abu Isam.”

The description “fearsome” in Arabic denotes something beyond “awesome”. Here, there is Reverence. Respect. Power.

The man talking to his boss might as well been talking about a raging black stallion, a piece of advanced weaponry or an overpowered racing car.

Those are the emotions stirred up by this piece of technology from cold Finland in a small, hot Arab mobile shop.

Don’t be fooled to think that it is the N96’s Digital TV broadcast receiver or its imaging or networking capabilities is what the “boss” finds “fearsome”. Who do you think we are? We’re neither function-appreciating Americans. And we’re certainly not frugal Europeans (those rationalists don’t even care about technology gadgets that much). It LOOKS fearsome. It LOOKS fearsome. LOOKS RULE. When the “boss” puts his mobile on the dinner table (that’s an Arab thing, my German friend tells me) it needs to blow away the other bosses’ phones with its FEARSOME LOOKS. Vroom!

Nokia Everywhere

The fact that the N96 was available for sale in every little mobile shop in that area, marketed in Arabic with professional leaflets talks volumes about Nokia’s staggering global power. These devices are status symbols. They are desired and they are available. Unlike Apple’s offering, which, two years after the iPhone was announced, we, in Jordan, don’t even have a release date yet.

Nokia makes its phones with Arabic keyboards. The SMS works in Arabic. The browser reads Arabic pages too, just in the case the boss launches it by mistake (or maybe he wants to check Aljazeera.com).

What is Apple telling the Arab world by not officially supporting Arabic on the iPhone: SCREW YOU!

The Arab world and China are the biggest markets of Nseries smart phones. No operator has secured the iPhone in Saudi Arabia yet, the biggest market of this smartphone loving region. Go figure.

The 5800 XpressMusic: How Nokia sucks at software and user experience (but how it might STILL kill the iPhone)

My frustrations with the iPhone are well documented elsewhere on this blog: no native video capturing. a primitive stills camera with no flash, no ability to share phone’s internet connection with laptop, having to get it from Orange (my number has been with Fastlink/Zain for a decade). When 3G becomes available in Jordan, I think that video telephony with my kids is something I would be doing a few times. Well, the iPhone has no front camera (which is so standard on phones these days). And so on..

Add to that Nokia’s excellent, FREE maps of Gulf cities like Doha, Dubai and Riyadh, which the iPhone doesn’t have.

Yes I know that the iPhone is not just about the phone itself, but about its integration with Apple’s internet cloud of iTunes music, TV shows, movies and podcast and about push mail through MobileMe. But when iTunes Music Store isn’t even activated in Jordan, the experience reverts back to the phone itself.

OK.. So this Batman phone really started to attract my attention over the past few weeks. The rumor sites where revealing more and more info about this phone. A 3.2MP camera with flash. Front camera. 3G. GPS, WiFi, a touchscreen an an updated touch based Symbian operating system.

My three top complaints about my current N95 would be the lack of a QWERTY keyboard, the clunky web browsing experience on its small screen and, generally, the user interface salad that Symbian is. So the 5800 sounded very promising for someone like me.

The October 2nd launch event for the XpressMusic 5800 was on my calendar as a “must attend” item, virtually over the web, during the Eid al Fitr holiday.

Nokia had pre-announced the event on its web site, as Nokia Remix London. Nice..

On October 2nd, 7:30 Amman time, I settled into my desk chair, ready to attend the online event. This is where excitement started turning into frustration! At 7:32 there still was nothing to see beside the announcement.

Then it dawned on me. I should have registered with this service called “Tangler” to participate. So I tried doing that.

A dozens of attempts and 30 minutes later I gave up. The Tangler people and behind them the Mighty Nokia screwed up. No registration was possible. The service was obviously overwhelmed with request they could not handle. When Nokia, a global giant of corporation forces us to register with some third party live discussion forum site, to watch their MARKETING EVENT, it’s truly unbelievable. That the whole weird scheme should actually fail under the pressure of demand is just outrageous.

Frustrated, I started following the text updates of the event on AllAboutSymbian, who also had a chat room with some fun people in it.

And finally the press photos and official specs started to appear on the web..

As the launch drew to a close, the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of this device started to become clear.

The Good: Yes it is a very capable phone, just as the leaks and rumors said. It will come at a very, very attractive price of €279. It will be one of the first phones that feature Nokia’s ambitious ‘Comes with Music’ offering, which allows you to download unlimited amounts of music under a yearly subscription plan.

The Bad: The design of the phone and the user interface is no match for the slickness of the iPhone. Nokia might have been able to teach Symbian a few new tricks in touch. But inconsistencies in the interface seem to be present is several places. The onscreen QWERTY screen looks primitive. You need to double tap stuff. No MultiTouch here.

The Ugly: The biggest fear is that the 5800 is not responsive enough in some key places. For example, in some of the “hands on” videos on the web, the phone takes several seconds to adjust screen orientation when turned. Flicking through photos sometimes brings up an animated ‘loading icon’. Scarier still is the nature of the touch screen: it is a resistive rather that a capacitive , which means it require more pressure to register taps (and is more suited to styluses). The iPhone’s light tap screen is a “capacitive” one.

Slowness of Nokia phones are often their biggest problems. My N95’s interface does funny things because it is slow (despite the fact that it is now on its third firmware update, see below). When I go to Gallery, it displays a ‘no image’ message while it “thinks”. Then, after a second or so it load the images. Not exactly a smooth user experience.

Have a look at this Gizmodo post including the above hands-on video.

It’s clear that Nokia’s phone operating system is stuck. It is somewhat like Microsoft Windows on the desktop: trying to move with the times but always ending up feeling like a jumble of a million things stuck together.

The Nokia software interface universe is full with usability and user experience problems. These start with inconsistent icon designs (which is not simply an aesthetic problem) and don’t end with progress bars that suddenly pop up on the screen and just say “installing” without specifying WHAT is being installed or how long this will take. Error messages flash onto the screen for very short periods then disappear before you had the chance to read them. During interface delays messages that are simply wrong appear. The interface “refreshes” and “redraws” itself in some instances. Phone settings and application management are confusing.

Nokia’s firmware updating software is cumbersome. There too you’ll find interface inconsistencies and mistakes, like using the same “check mark” icon to indicate that process was finished AND on a button to move to the next process.

On Vista, there is always a possibility that the Nokia Software Updater (NSU) doesn’t work unless you disable firewalls or turn off sharing of your wireless connection in the Windows control panels. To find out what the problem is you’d have to visit Nokia’s discussion forum’s and try to find people with the same problem as you.

Nokia is also oblivious to the needs of the growing numbers of Mac users. There is no way to update your phone’s firmware from a Mac.
So.. What am I saying here?

Despite ALL of this, the Nokia’s new touchscreen phone is very likely to be winner. This XpressMusic phone and the other touchscreen phones that inevitably will come out from Nokia also might pose a big challenge to the iPhone’s rise.

There is the Nokia brand presence and distribution. I think I said enough about that already. The Middle East will be one of the first markets to get the new phone. I will be able to walk into any mobile shop in the coming few weeks and just buy it. For many people in the world Nokia is the STANDARD. It is like Windows, Coke and Gillette. Simply Everywhere.

Hardware-wise, Nokia’s offerings are very capable. Even as a mid-range phone with a reasonable price, the 5800 answers many of the complaints with the iPhone. It shoots video. It has the great mapping app with local cities (Google maps is not great in the Middle East), it has expandable memory and a replaceable battery. It sends MMS.

Add to that: a midrange price and no binding contracts that force an operator upon you.

Nokia is so large and dominant. It doesn’t even need to ‘kill the iPhone’ with a single strike. It will first put out this 5800. Then see how the response was. Then improve it. Then start putting touchscreen on Nseries and Eseries phones. And nobody can deny that their devices impress everyone.

For me, I will rush to the nearest mobile shop when the XpressMusic 5800 arrives in Jordan. I will insist on playing around with it for at least 30 minutes. The most important aspects I will be looking for are: is it fast enough? Is the touchscreen usable? Is the browser good? Is the onscreen QWERTY keyboard better than typing message with T9. If all of these aspects turn out positive, I might be tempted to buy it.

Or I might wait for the next Nokia touchscreen phone.

My dream remains an iPhone Pro: an IPhone that answers my complaints. That would be “fearsome” enough for me

Epilogue: Updating my N95 to version 3 of the firmware

This whole story leaves me stuck (still, quite happily) with an ‘original’ N95 for a few weeks, if not a whole year. As I was hunting through the web for Nokia info during the holiday, I found out that firmware 30.0.015 has been released.

I inviting a friend with a Windows laptop over to my house (hello George!). After several hours of work and scouring online support sites , we finally managed to install the update. All of this just reminded me how severely flawed Nokia’s user experience is!

Anyway, I now have a phone that’s a bit faster. A browser that plays Flash videos (although this had some glitches) and version 2 of Nokia’s Maps application and, Auto Screen Rotate (yes the N95 had an accelerometer in it all along but it was not used by the phone’s software. Arrrgh Nokia!).

This should keep me happy for some time.

Read these related posts on 360east:

• Nokia XpressMusic 5800 available for pre-order in Jordan
• The funniest phone problem: Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic screen goes fuzzy when cold!
• Nokia 5800 XpressMusic ships in the UAE, Jordan and Saudi Arabia in December ‘08
• Nokia’s Anssi Vanjoki @ The Dead Sea: Will a date be set for releasing the 5800 XpressMusic and other burining questions
• Nokia to demonstrate the 5800 XpressMusic at the Dead Sea today