STEPHEN FRY

The rumour flew around that something new was in the works combining all the power of Daddy and all the elegance of Mummy. We couldn’t wait. This will be the Big One, we thought, the justification and apotheosis of UIQ.

Mine arrived at the beginning of this week. What a crushing, lowering, fury-inducing disappointment. Just how dumb are the software engineers, designers and marketeers at Sony E? Believe me, I so wanted this to be good. Instead, it is nothing more than a gesture, an under-considered, badly implemented nod at the market. It’s an M600i running Symbian v 9.1 and UIQ v 3.0 equipped with a camera and WiFi.. That’s it. No attempt has been made to alter the UI or the OS. The result: the clumsiest, most asinine method of internet connection ever devised (yes it has a wizard to download your network’s APN etc., but that’s not enough) comes unaltered, the bugginess and the slowness too have all have been inherited, and the short battery life. Did they really think slinging on a 3.2MP camera and WiFi would make a desirable device, let alone an iPhone killer?

I could issue forth quires of intemperate fury on the subject of how bad internet account configuration is on the UIQ Sony Ericssons. It’s utterly pointless. Is there not one person at either Sony E or Symbian who themselves uses the phone and says “hang on, we could do this better”? That’s all it takes. Just one person to point at the Emperor and shout “nudie!” That’s why Apple is Apple, they have people there (and of course it comes from the top) who say – “woah, not good enough, not cool enough, not simple enough, not fun enough, not sexy enough, not clever enough, not useful enough”. The P1i is what happens when “oh, that’ll do” becomes the corporate motto. UIQ promised something, the actual GUI is reasonable, in fact quite delightful, but it needed refinement, it needed acceleration and it needed flair. Instead we’ve got a very, very slow device that eats power, is difficult to use in varying environments and frequently hangs and crashes. In a word unusable. And I can just hear them hiding behind the excuse of “price” and “sectors of the market” and other bullshit. What, Apple’s a bigger company than Sony? Got more muscle? What muscle it has got, it got from daring to be better. That was once true of Sony too. Of Ericsson I cannot speak …

Don’t these people get it? A new sidebar coming on …

Design matters By design here, I mean GUI and OS as much as outer case design. Let’s go back to houses. The sixties taught us, surely, that architectural design, commercial and domestic, is not an extra. The office you work in every day, the house you live in every day, they are more than the sum of their functions. We know that sick building syndrome is real, and we know what an insult to the human spirit were some of the monstrosities constructed in past decades. An office with strip lighting, drab carpets, vile partitions and dull furniture and fittings is unacceptable these days, as much perhaps because of the poor productivity it engenders as the assault on dignity it represents. Well, computers and SmartPhones are no less environments: to say “well my WinMob device does all that your iPhone can do” is like saying my Barratt home has got the same number of bedrooms as your Georgian watermill, it’s got a kitchen too, and a bathroom.” … I accept that price is an issue here; if budget is a consideration then you’ll have to forgive me, I’m writing from the privileged position of being able to indulge my taste for these objects. But who can deny that design really matters? Or that good design need not be more expensive? We spend our lives inside the virtual environment of digital platforms – why should a faceless, graceless, styleless nerd or a greedy hog of a corporate twat deny us simplicity, beauty, grace, fun, sexiness, delight, imagination and creative energy in our digital lives? And why should Apple be the only company that sees that? Why don’t the other bastards GET IT?? My disappointment in the P1i turned to anger as the real structural flaws emerged. The awful laggardly horrors of the mail inboxes with their perpetual “Busy” box flashing away. The miserable nonsense of the browser (a bad implementation of Opera) – I mean what on earth is the point of having menu shortcuts that involve using two fingers? Typing a “1” on the keyboard to pull up the URL entry box is fine if you’ve a numeric keypad, but to have to depress a modifier key too? Bah!