As you may remember from my previous post, I picked up a Nokia N73 (Music Edition) smartphone on my trip to Thailand a couple of months ago. I’ve been getting used to it since, and I only have a couple of gripes about it thus far. The main thing would be the response time of the menu system, which I understand has something to do with the delay the operating system seems to have in place for handling shortcut keys (this is my assumption, not anything I’ve read anywhere.) I haven’t dug around enough to see if there’s some way of reducing the sluggishness (maybe there’s some kind of hard-coded delay?), but I have one other issue that I’m pretty sure I’d need some kind of plugin to cope with.

All things considered, I really like the S60 (3rd Edition) interface. It’s very user-friendly for the most part, and the skinning system is quite full-featured. I’ve gone through dozens of skins trying to find one that suited me, and settled on Mask by PTWS, which is easy on the eyes. Throughout every theme I’ve installed, however, I’ve noticed the same issue: there doesn’t seem to be any way to customize the S60 dashboard display!

Now, Nokia appears to refer to the dashboard as the “Active Standby” screen. I’m not exactly sure why it’s called that — I spent ages searching around for “homepage”, “start page”, “dashboard”, and pretty much every other name under the sun before discovering the name they referred to it by — but it appears that you can turn it off at will through the Settings > Standby menu. My problem here is that although I appreciate being about to configure my softkeys and set which Active Standby apps that I have up on the top end of my dashboard, I can’t do anything to alter the display of calendar entries or to-do tasks, let alone modify which elements are displayed on the dashboard.

Of course, I know I could go out and download a custom dashboard app. I don’t want to do that; I like the S60 built-in version well enough that all I want is to be able to tweak it a little. According to this post over at the NSeries blog, it seems that other Nokia S60 phones have some way of slightly altering the display. Why isn’t this plugins menu available on my N73?

All I’d really like to do is to display to-do notes that are due today, instead of showing a generic “X to-do notes not done” message if you have more than one in your list. The ability to customize anything else would be gravy. I don’t think I’m asking for much, so maybe Nokia will listen (I know they read a lot of the phone blogs out there!) and add this to a firmware update down the road.

Of course, if anyone else has any suggestions on how I could do this without adding a 3rd party dashboard app, feel free to let me know. It’s the ability to make little tweaks and customizations like this that make applications much more usable.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Posted in Gadgets, Rants, Technology |