I bought a Nokia 6682 phone a couple of weeks ago, as an upgrade for my Nokia 6230. Actually, I have my parents signed up on my service plan, and I was planning on sending them the 6230 to replace an older phone they lost, and taking advantage of this as an excuse to upgrade… The 6682 is a Symbian “smartphone” sporting Nokia’s Series 60 UI, and I was influenced by rave reviews like Russell Beattie’s. In recent years, Nokia has been churning out phones with crackpot designs and dubious usability for coolness’ sake. There must have been a customer backlash, as their recent phones like the 6682 have a much more reasonable, reassuringly boring but functional design. Another reason is that Apple’s iSync only works with Nokia’s Series 60 phones, and it will sync photos from the OS X address book.

I returned the phone for a refund last Friday, because the ergonomics are simply atrocious, and from a usability point of view it was actually an unacceptable downgrade from the Series 40 (non-Symbian) Nokia 6230. The low-res 176×208 screen has significantly lower information density than the 320×480 or 640×480 screens now standard on most PDAs, and makes web browsing almost useless. The only thing it has going for it is a semi-decent camera.

Even basic functionality like the address book is poorly implemented. When you scroll down your contacts list, you can select one to decide whether you want to reach them on their home or mobile number. The problem is, the next time you want to make a call and access the address book, you do not start afresh, but still in the list of contacts for the previous contact, making you back out. Let’s not even mention the ridiculously complex key sequence required to record a voice memo.

I have to contrast this with my Palm Tungsten T3, in my book still the best PDA ever (specially compared to the underwhelming, plasticky T5 or the boat-anchor and RAM-starved Lifedrive). Recording a voice memo merely requires pressing and holding a dedicated button, something that can be done one-handed by touch alone. Palm’s address book quick look up scrolling algorithm is a model of efficiency yet to be matched on any phone I have ever used. PalmOS might be getting long in the tooth, specially as regards multitasking, and its future is cloudy, but it still has a serious edge in usability. This is not by accident — Palm paid as much attention to the user interface as Apple did in its day, as this anecdote by New York Times technology columnist David Pogue illustrates:

I once visited Palm Computing in its heyday. One guy I met there introduced himself as tap counter. It was his job to make sure that no task on the PalmPilot required more than three taps of the stylus on the screen. More than three steps, and the feature had to be redesigned. Electronics should save time, not waste it.

In retrospect, I should not have been surprised by the 6682’s poor ergonomics, they were readily apparent from day one. The device is neither a good phone, nor an even halfway acceptable PDA. I decided to give it a chance, thinking it could just be a question of settling into an unfamiliar user interface. I did not have as long an adaptation period when moving from my old T68i to the 6230, and after two weeks my dim initial opinion of the Series 60 had if anything deteriorated further. Russell Beattie can dish it, but he can’t take it. In hindsight, Beattie’s defensiveness about smart people preferring dumb phones over jack-of-all-trades devices was not a good sign.

Pundits have been predicting the demise of the PDA at the hands of the smartphone for many years. Phones certainly outsell PDAs by a handy margin, but a small minority of them are smartphones, and I suspect most people get them for the improved cameras and disregard the unusable advanced functionality. I tend to agree with this old but still valid assessment — the best option is to have a decent PDA in hand, connected to the cell phone in your pocket via Bluetooth.

I suspect the smartphones’ ergonomic shortcomings are structural, not just due to lack of usability skills on the manufacturers’ part. Nokia knows how to design good user interfaces, like Navi or Series 40, but the situation with Series 60 is not going to be rectified anytime soon. The reason for this is that most people buy their cell phones with a subsidy that is paid back over the duration of a 1 or 2 year minimum duration contract. This control over distribution allows the mobile operators ultimate say over the feature set. This is most visible in branding elements like Cingular’s “Media store” icon that flogs overpriced garbage like downloadable ring tones.

To add injury to insult, deleting those “features” is disabled, so they keep hogging scarce memory and screen real estate. Carriers also disable features that would allow people to use their phones without being nickel-and-dimed for expensive intelligent network services like MMS, like some Bluetooth functionality or the ability to send photos over email rather than MMS. It is highly likely carriers will fight tooth-and-nail against the logical inclusion of WiFi and VoIP in future handsets. This conflict of interest between carriers and users won’t be resolved until regulators compel them to discontinue what is in effect a forced bundling practice.

Mobile carriers, like their Telco forebears, seem to believe if they piss on something, it improves the flavor… This is also the reason why I think mobile operator cluelessness about mobile data services is terminal — they keep pushing their failed walled-garden model of WAP services using phones, and gouge for the privilege of using a PDA or laptop to access the real Internet via Bluetooth, while at the same time not deigning to provide any support. WiFi may not be an ideal technology, specially in terms of ubiquity, but as long as carriers make us unwashed users jump through hoops to be allowed access to their data networks, low-hassle WiFi access using a PDA will be the superior, if intermittent alternative to a data-enabled phone. As for the aborted phone upgrade, I guess I will just wait for the Nokia 6270 to hit these blighted shores.