{"id":5,"date":"2005-07-27T02:41:17","date_gmt":"2005-07-26T23:41:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/blog\/?p=5"},"modified":"2018-12-28T16:44:09","modified_gmt":"2018-12-28T23:44:09","slug":"communicator-and-nokias-software-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/?p=5","title":{"rendered":"Communicator and Nokia&#8217;s software problems"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I didn&#8217;t buy PSP but instead satisfied my instant gadget hunger with Nokia Communicator 9500. I&#8217;ve had the system for some 24hrs now.<\/p>\n<p>Pros:<br \/>\n1. Remote email works<br \/>\n2. Calendar sync works as well<br \/>\n3. Keyboard is nice<\/p>\n<p>Cons: the system software sucks big time. Every aspect of it. This is my first communicator but I had tested some earlier models and knew that Symbian is a slow Java-sucker. However, I was really surprised to learn that the Symbian\/Java cancer affects the basic phone functionality as well. There is substantial lag with basically any key stroke! Usability suffers.<\/p>\n<p>As I noted, both email and calendar sync now work. These are the most important add-ons (so far) this phone brings to me. However, they are far from perfect. Nokia&#8217;s email software is so crappy it doesn&#8217;t seem to understand mail box (IMAP) folders. And then there is the basic problem that retrieving email is incredibly slow even when I&#8217;m connected through Wifi. In this regard, there is practically no progress from the times when I used Palm VII in the United States. That was in 2000! It seems to take one 10-30 sec &#8220;slice&#8221; only to check if I have new email. Downloading any new messages takes another slice or two. Naturally those &#8220;slices&#8221; can double or triple when the connection is through the basic phone network (GPRS). Maybe I can fix this problem somewhat by locating and installing a better email client. At least I need extra security software (communicator has no SSH support) to send some mail.<\/p>\n<p>Sync works, yes, but it is buggy and took 4 hours to install. It was like configuring a PC some 15 years ago. I have a Mac and officially neither Nokia nor Apple provide any help for guys like me. I had to locate, download, install and learn to use <i>a hack<\/i>. It&#8217;s 2005 god damn it! And I&#8217;m talking about big companies and their &#8220;premium&#8221; products&#8230; I had to first fool the communicator to eat some extra non-standard software and then edit a script in a secret folder on my Mac. Grazy. Now it kind of works &#8211; I only need to press a few extra keys at every sync because the communicator isn&#8217;t comfortable with my hack. Still, this is much better than with my old SonyEricsson, which synced out-of-the-box but always messed up times and dates. At least Nokia does the functionality correct.<\/p>\n<p>All in all, I&#8217;ve confirmed a fact I sort of knew before. Nokia&#8217;s software development is fucked up. Symbian sucks, usability sucks, compatibility sucks. Worse, many of these problems are terminal and cannot be fixed. I can see dead-ends everywhere: Symbian is not intended for real computers where phones are transforming into and obviously Nokia can&#8217;t head the development of basic system software intended for real computers. Thus, I&#8217;d argue Nokia&#8217;s move towards &#8220;outsourced&#8221; Linux and open source software development is a necessity, not deliberate strategy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I didn&#8217;t buy PSP but instead satisfied my instant gadget hunger with Nokia Communicator 9500. I&#8217;ve had the system for some 24hrs now. Pros: 1. Remote email works 2. Calendar sync works as well 3. Keyboard is nice Cons: the system software sucks big time. Every aspect of it. This is my first communicator but &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/?p=5\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Communicator and Nokia&#8217;s software problems&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1850,"href":"https:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions\/1850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}