Ok. The to-do list is a very odd place to start, but I’m starting here because it was one of the things I was looking forward to having on me and synchronized at all times, and as such, it was one of the first things I noticed problems with. Plus, oddly enough, the iPhone doesn’t have one at all. Meaning if you got this totally right Nokia, you’d be out ahead! As it is, I expect v1 of the iPhone to-do list to whup this nearly functional one before Nokia gets around to fixing it.
From a good news standpoint, I had a really basic phone before this, and I have also checked out my wife’s Razor and the typeface on most phones (those included) really skeeves me out. The type on the Nokia Series 60 phones is pretty nice. It’s even a little reminiscent of good ol’ Chicago.
So… that’s the good news. The bad news is as follows.
All the list items are in one big uncategorizable blob. terrible if you’re a GTD person (which I’ve tried, and given up recently due to the dishearteningly large number of to-dos that show up on my phone, and my inability to keep the list well-synched from one machine to the next).
With this tiny, clear type, you could actually read longer to-do items on the phone. That is, unless you bolded all of them, made it impossible to scroll horizontally, and nudged them over so they would align with the column created by the giant calendar icon above, thus losing even more horizontal space:
Also, as you see, I’m not someone who always gets around to assigning dates to my to-do items. But unfortunately, I can’t make that work to my advantage and hide the dates.
My last pet peeve, which is just a general problem rather than Nokia’s, is that if you have multiple computers and a phone, you shouldn’t have to work at keeping them synched up. It doesn’t seem like expensive technology to acquire or build to get a calendar that works on a mac, pc, a phone and a web browser, and does all its synching on the sly.
Nokia, you are so close here… you got the type right. Your icons are nice. It feels pretty good to use already. You can do it – go the last lap!
