Linkstew

In his commentary on Nokia's new Buttons for Humans campaign, Russell Beattie actually calls out the 3650, and grants that the "round keypad wasn't actually that bad."

I've owned and used a 3650 for going on 3 years now, and it took me most of that time to figure out that not only is the round keypad "not that bad," but I'd be prepared to argue that it's actually good -- if not better -- than your average square keypad. You can call me crazy, but the reason is simple: the round keypad offers a one dimensional search space for numbers and letters:

Rather than having feel and count the possible subtle lines that separate buttons on most phones and remembering that "T" is sort of bottom middle and "2" is top middle unless there are extra buttons above it, I just have to remember that "T" is near the end and"2" is near the beginning. In fact, I wouldn't even call it a "round keypad," because it's actually a linear keypad.

In addition to the linear, one dimensional search space (the same one that make's the Mac's menu bar so much nicer to use), each of the non-numeric keys have distinct shapes and positions. Where there are repeated shapes, they're on opposite sides of the phone, and serve opposite purposes (answer and hang-up, edit input and delete/clear, select and back/exit). Recognizing that different button shapes help the thumb find what it's looking for was one of the main differentiators that made the GameCube controller so great.

(Of course, off the deep end of different button shapes are the many many other Nokia phones that Beattie was actually talking about.)

I admit the keypad had a bit of a learning curve, but once learned, if not better, the 3650's keypad was at least as good as your cookie cutter keypad. It's too bad most people weren't willing to give that different looking thing a chance; When I finally upgrade my phone later this year, I for one will definitely miss that quirky looking keypad.

Apparently AT&T snuck a bunch of shareware onto my phone while I wasn't looking [1], because when I started up the application manager earlier this evening, it asked me if I wanted to install 6 new programs. In what was probably a foolish decision, I said "yes," and quite awhile later I had a bunch of new programs that sucked.

One of them was "Active Toons," which is apparently a little app for making "MMS" pictures to send to your friends. When I opened Active Toons, I was greeted with a little cartoon picture of a guy with blonde hair in a red shirt. The first menu item was "Edit Character," which I clicked on, because I neither have blonde hair nor would I ever wear a red shirt.

On the edit character screen, there were menu items for "Change Skin Color," "Change Hair" (with three or four options for haircut, and then an option to change hair color), and "Change Top" (with two options for shirt styles and option to change top color). But the first item in the list was "Become a Woman."

So I did.

But the point is, with all of the other menu items consistently reading "Change X," the "Become a Woman" verbiage only stuck out that much more. Admittedly, I'm not sure if "Change Sex" would have been any better, but at least it would have been consistent.

And then, when it comes time to compose an MMS, you have a few options to change backgrounds (there are a few cartoon backgrounds, or you can impose your character over a picture you've taken with the phone's camera), and you can also select an emotion from the options of Happy, Angry, Sad, and "Surprized [2]."

Here's the character I ended up with. I can't imagine why she looks so surprized.

And that was the extent of the entertainment I derived from these programs. And they were less useful than they were entertaining. Thanks AT&T.

[1] Huh, I wonder if that's why my phone's been periodically refusing to make or receive calls sometimes, and the only fix I've found is to restart the phone. That'd be really awesome. SALLMRV.
[2] Yes, it's spelled with a z in the program.

So I've had the phone for a little more than a week now, and I still like it. Here's a few more things I've noticed about it:

• I've been using Smart Profiles for the last week to do profile scheduling, and it certainly works as advertised (though the "daemon" has crashed a few times). Before I commit to that app I'm going to try this miniGPS and Extended Profiles suite. It's more expensive, but it looks like the extended profiles half of the suite is functionally equivalent, and the miniGPS half of the suite adds location based events, based on what cell phone towers you're near, which sounds pretty damn cool.
• Either way, I'm a little hesitant to buy an application that will be bound to the ID of my phone. I want my software licensed to me, not my phone.
• There's a really irritating bit of behavior where, if you lock your keypad and then wait long enough for the screen saver to activate, the first press of the "Unlock" soft key doesn't register, so you have to press it again and then press star to unlock the keypad. Actually, the phone is a little slow to respond fairly frequently, and that first press of Unlock which deactivates the screen saver is one of those slow to respond moments, so unlocking the keypad always takes a second or two longer than it should. Very frustrating.
• And while the large screen is nice, I'm really afraid it's going to be a scratch magnet. And for that matter, it smudges like crazy when I hold it to my face. I think that's just going to be a tradeoff.

Here's a few more comments on my shiny new 3650:

• As Mike pointed out in the comments, the "hang up" button usually takes you to the top level of the phone, serving much the same purpose as the "C" button I was so used to habitually pressing on my 5165. The reason I dismissed that as a possibility initially is that I came across some screen where pressing hang up asked me if I was sure I wanted to delete something, which is a bad option to press habitually. But now that I look, I can't recreate that behavior.
• As if it weren't ridiculous enough that my digital camera can run MAME to emulate arcade games, now my cell phone can emulate Game Boy and Game Boy Color games. Unfortunately, the circular keypad is a little awkward for playing game boy games, and worse, it doesn't seem like it acknowledges two simultaneous button presses (so I can't jump diagonally, for example).
• The phone can capture short videos, but the quality is far from fantastic. I suppose it might be amusing in some circumstance some day. (If you want to watch movies taken with the phone, you need this quicktime plugin.)
• This program both addresses my desire for scheduled profiles and auto-keypad-locking (though I'm not sure if the auto-keypad-locking is working). I'm going to have to play with it for a few days to make sure it's not too buggy before I decide to buy it. Being able to address problems with the phone through third party software is a nice unanticipated side effect of having such a seemingly overpowered phone.
• Ironically, the one thing I still have yet to really do is use this thing as a phone. Besides three calls to AT&T technical support (Once about locking myself out of the phone because I didn't know the PIN number (see the end of the last post), once about not knowing my account number (which I needed to use the web site), and once about the web site not letting me register and giving me some error code), I haven't used this thing for its intended purpose.
• It was sufficiently non-obvious to me that the call volume was adjusted by pressing left and right that I had to look it up in the manual. I suspect I didn't realize this because of a little usability flaw: Since I was calling tech support, I was in menu-hell, and accordingly, pressing lots of buttons. When you type during a call, the numbers are entered into an on screen buffer, and when that buffer is active, left and right move your cursor through the buffer instead of adjusting the volume. To adjust the volume, you have to hit cancel to hide the buffer, which I was afraid to do because I thought that would hang up my call.
• When I was on hold for a few minutes, the speakerphone option was really nice to have.

Cnet's Top 10 Must Have Gadgets

Man, I know I'm a gadget geek, but I'm almost embarrassed that I own the top 3 items on this list, and own one more if you count my TiVo series one.

I got my new credit card yesterday, and though I'm still disgusted by it, I did feel a certain excitement once it was in my hand. But rather than let whim get the best of me, I got something I needed instead: a new cell phone and plan. In particular, I got the Nokia 3650 I've had my eye on for a couple of months.

I've been playing with the phone all evening, and I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface. The short version is it's a damn good phone with a lot of flexibility, but it has just a few little flaws. It's definitely a gadget geek's phone, though. Here's the bullet point version of my first impressions:

• Physical details:
• The round keypad is the first thing anyone'll notice, and it's really not that bad. The biggest problem I have with it isn't the layout, but rather that it's kind of hard to hit the buttons on the right side of the phone when holding the phone with my right hand. This is more of a function of the size of the phone than the layout of the keypad, and I don't think any of the smaller phones would fare any better in this department.
• The keypad itself feels a little flimsy, and I'm a little worried about how the directional pad will hold up to wear and tear. Hopefully it's trivially replaceable like old Nokia keypads.
• The good:
• While it's significantly larger than some of the micro phones you can buy these days, I don't think that's a bad thing. The size of the 3650 is just a little smaller than my old Nokia 5165 in most dimensions, but it's significantly lighter. This is all good.
• The primary reason I bought this phone was because it has bluetooth, and it synchronizes my data with OS X beautifully as advertised. Definitely worth it. It's also really convenient to transfer ringtones and other files to and from the phone with bluetooth. Very nice.
• While I don't really have much use for a phone that takes pictures or videos, it's still an interesting option to have. And while the picture quality is far from fantastic, it's actually much better than the old web cam I had back in the day.
• Voice dial is far from a new feature, but it's new for me, and I think it's neat. We'll see if I actually use it in practice.
• While I knew the phone had "polyphonic ringtones," it never occurred to me that that meant "MIDI." But it does mean MIDI, which opens up so many possibilities... most of them bad. Can you say "Gato's Song?" Heh. I'm pretty sure that if I ever wanted to kill myself, it'd be a simple matter of finding the most annoying midi ringtone possible and playing it for awhile in a public place.
• The nits:
• For some stupid reason, the only option for displaying the contacts is as "Last name First name," with no comma. What I'd really like is the ability to display the contacts "First name Last name," sorted by last name, but I'd be happy with "Last name, First name." The lack of a comma really bothers me for some reason. But Nokia released a software update to add sound recording to the video recorder, so there's still hope. I'm going to try mailing them.
• With my old phone, I got into the habit of pressing "cancelcancelcancelcancelcancel" a lot, just to pop out to the top level of the phone. With the 3650, there's not exactly a dedicated "cancel" button. On most screens, the right "soft button" is either "Exit" or "Back," which is effectively "cancel," so my muscle memory kicks in and I press that button a lot. The problem is, when I get to the top level, that soft button becomes an app launcher, so instead of just getting to the top level, I end up launching an app instead. Kind of irritating. I may just have to write a placeholder app to put in that position to solve this irritation.
• Other phones have an auto keylock function. Why doesn't the 3650? And thanks to the aforementioned inability to get to the main menu without looking at the screen, there's no way for me to lock the phone without looking at the screen. Bummer. I'll definitely have to find a solution to this problem. =\
  Update: It turns out there's an "auto-keylock" feature hidden in the security menu. The problem is, I just want auto-keypad locking to disable accidental button presses, but the security option requires using a lockcode, which might be more inconvenient than it's worth. We'll see.
• Nokia phones have had profiles for awhile, but when are they going to take profiles to the next level and allow the user to set times for certain profiles to be automatically enabled? "Use the work profile M-F from 10 am - 7 pm," etc. That'd be so awesome.
• The ugly:
• While trying to turn on the auto-lockcode feature, I didn't know the PIN number or the Lock Code for the SIM card, and I accidentally locked myself out of the phone. There's a "Personal Unlock Key" (PUK) that's needed to unlock the phone once it gets in this state, but it wasn't included with my phone, so I had to call AT&T and find out the PUK. The customer support guy joked that "there's nothing we can do for you," which at the time wasn't that funny, but in retrospect, it's worth a chuckle. I'm a little disappointed that I wasn't warned about that by the guy at the AT&T wireless store last night, but in the end everything worked out alright.

Heh, now all need is my obligatory yellow faceplate and I'll be set. =)

(I'm probably going to update this list over the next couple of days as I actually use the phone some)