got to love seeing people go eye-candy crazy…

its like junkies between highs…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP3YNcSOMlg has a video demo of it, I just spotted that one.

And at the risk of sounding like an adolescent, OMG! it’s still Symbian-slow in places. Pauses in the OS as stuff loads, and changing from portrait to landscape took seconds. You’d think Nokia would have learned already that people won’t accept their handset slowing them down as much as they did pre-iPhone.

Sure, it’s a leap from the Nokia E50 I had, which literally took seconds to register a keypress from time to time, but to me from what I’m seeing, the 5800 still has a fairly unattractive interface and worst of all, nasty slowdowns.

Watching that video with it gradually redrawing the items on screen made me scoff loudly… which is bad, since I’m here alone at the moment.

Again, may be just me.

Symbian is facing the same uphill battle as Windows Mobile, taking an aging hodgepodge of an OS and making it into an exemplary touch-enabled star.

Frankly I doubt it can be done nearly as well as with the iPhone with its full-on Unix underpinnings and Apples graphical goodness on top. Symbian and WinMo are both examples of “phone os’es” whereas the iPhone is really very powerful under the hood too and purpose created to be eminently touchable.

That said, the phone I’m getting is the Touch HD… but thats just because there are some WinMo apps I use a lot and I want that superior screen for surfing, e-books and whatnot. The 5800 doesn’t really have any such standout feature to me. My gut reaction is “one more boring, semi-nasty Symbian phone with touchy pretensions” rather than any feeling of techno-wow. Maybe that’s just me.

Guess we’ll see. Nokia phones can usually sell anyway.

Kevin, yes I know what you mean. I found it awkward at first, but don’t notice it now. I double tap without thinking for quick access. I do like the fact you can access other options quickly (especially in contacts… highlight contact choose action from options menu etc.). Look forward to reading how you get on

Thanks Rafe. I get the “why” it is the way it is, but I don’t find it to be optimal from the end-user experience just yet. My opinion, of course…

Kevin – the single / double tap thing is because it’s a focus driven UI. In a list you have to select an item, and then tap it again for the action. I wrote some stuff about this on AAS. In other places it is a single tap.

Please pitty us fools with a video JK.