Christian Anderson wrote:
>Yeah, its definitely good to talk about usability, but maybe it should have
>its own thread? Then we can complain and praise our phones there rather than
>stray off topic?
>
I want to raise the question: is anyone else upset by the user interface
of the SonyEricsson phones?
I find the jog-dial very annoying in certain situations and relatively
usable in others. It's convenient to quickly scroll through the
hierarchical address book, but it's annoying as hell when you try to
play a game which uses the up/down keys.
It also seems that the SE models are one of the few which do not support
choosing a top level menu item using a single key from the keypad
(opposed to moving a marker with the arrows and choosing the active item
with the 'select' key).
On the positive side, the rotating camera of A5402S is pretty cool
(though I'd trade it for decent keyboard navigation)...
Now let's go to the software (here my comments are specifically about
A5402S). The first thing a user notices is the flashing and bubbling
menu icons, which are only five... Next to the icons we see text labels,
but guess what - they have nothing to do with them. The text labels are
the options of the currently selected icon. When we press the 'select'
key (in fact we press the jog dial), a menu marker appears and all
becomes clear. The rest looks like an ordinary hierarchical menu with
the exception that we still have all the top-level icons on the left of
the menu items (but since we already know this trick, we'll just pay no
attention to them). After I got used to these UI peculiarities, I never
had much trouble finding a function I was looking for (except for the
rather obscure ones, like 'how to turn off the minute-minder').
The mail client is pretty decent and all the features like attaching of
multiple images, shoot&send, templates, etc. are pretty usable.
And at last, we come to the camera software. In the shoot mode, we see
the whole image immediately after we shoot, but once we save it there is
no way to view it (whole on one screen) again. Even in the max zoom-out
the images are still cropped and the user should scroll vertically (I
suppose they made it to justify the presence of that jog-thing). Also, I
miss a next/prev image buttons (could have been mapped to left/right arrow).
As a conclusion, I would say that A5402S is pretty good phone
(especially if you don't read Japanese :-), but there are a few UI
bloopers which if fixed could notably enhance the overall user experience.
cheers,
Dimiter
Received on Mon Jan 26 17:18:34 2004