Here’s hopefully a post that will keep growing as I keep thinking of other facilities — what would the ideal mobile phone offer and look like:
- I really like the touchscreen ones which interpret hand gestures (e.g. iPhone, Blackberry Storm etc)
- I also like the possibility of having both a full QWERTY keyboard and also the “standard” keypad with letters assigned to it, using the T9 technology (based on a dictionary) — specifically, see the keyboard(s) offered by the Blackberry Storm.
- Should have though the facility to add words to the dictionary — this is important as if you work in IT you find out that there are new acronyms appearing over night and rather than switching to a QWERTY keyboard to type it letter-by-letter every time, it’s handy to have them added to the dictionary — in particular I did like this facility in the Nokia N95 phone
- An “auto-correct” facility is also a very nice facility to have — I do want to write “I’m” every time, but instead just type “Im” and have the software change that on the fly to “I’m”; also need to be able to edit the list for “auto-correct”
I also did like the camera on the Nokia N95 — 5 megapixels!!!
Obviously it needs a pretty good MP3 player — I’m not fussed about any other formats to be honest as MP3 is pretty much the standard nowadays — I did like in the particular the Sony Ericsson players so it should probably incorporate some of that.
The player should have support for a graphic equalizer — nothing fancy, just a few presets for “rock”, “techno” etc…
On top of being able to scan automatically the memory for new tracks it should be able to read the ID3 tags and organize music by artists/albums/etc. Also it should definitely have a “shuffle” setting, and one for “repeat play” which should allow playing to restart again from first song in the playlist once it hits the end of it.
No need to mention that it needs to synchronize with the user PIM — e.g. Outlook. I mention here Outlook because that has been the PIM of my choice for years (apologies to the Firefox/Mozilla fans and the Open Office crowd, but there’s a lot more that needs to be done on that front!) — however, since that’s part of the Microsoft Office suite which tends to be pricey, it should offer at least the facility of synchronizing with the default Windows Address Book which is included for free in every Windows distribution. Of course, that means it will only synchronize the address book, however, when used with something like Microsoft Outlook I expect the address book, task list, calendar entries, notes and even contact pictures to be synchronized.
In terms of result of synchronization, I did like the Nokia software which gave you a list on the left hand side, broken down into changes on pc, changes on the device, removals (device/pc), conflicts and matches. That came in very handy because I was never interested in what was added on the PC or the device and quite happy therefore to copy these additions both ways, however, the removals list I always used to inspect — as occasionally i might delete something by mistake on the phone (silly me!) — and also the conflicts list — which allowed me to select which one of the 2 conflicting values to keep.
I know that the BlackBerry software offers something similar, but the high level report/overview is not at all intuitive, I thought — as it presents everything into a single grid (though it does label items as “to remove”, “add” etc) — if they could only offer the facility to have that grid broken down into all those categories that would be a major improvement I think!
One other thing — and possibly one of the most important: the ideal mobile really should be chargeable via a normal USB 2.0 cable. I had enough of the likes of Nokia and Sony and BlackBerry having some weird connectors that you always have to walk around with a cable in your pocket! Whereas USB cables you will find wherever you go (and a PC to charge it from)…
Despite the fact that I like the touchscreen interface, the phone however does need to have up/down/left/right keys, as otherwise it is impossible nearly to go back and delete or add some text — this i find to be very frustrating with the Storm.
Going back to the dictionary facility — I would like a phone that “learns” new words automatically as I type them (using the QWERTY keyboard) rather than having to go through the menus and add them manually. For instance, on my Storm, I use most of the time their autocomplete/autosuggest facility when sending an SMS, however, occasionally I might need to add a new word that the Storm doesn’t “know” about — typically IT-field acronyms (e.g. XSLT, Xalan etc). Since the word is not in the Storm dictionary, I turn the phone on the side, the QWERTY keyboard comes up and I can type the term letter by letter, which is all good. However, at this point (or when I send the text), I would like the phone to store the newly typed term so next time I have to use it I don’t have to repeat this procedure, but instead the term should pop up in the autocomplete list.
What’s up everyone, I’m new to the forum and just wanted to say hey. Hopefully I posted this in the right section!