Symbian Foundation dares to call characters in the dialer a 'brainstorm idea'
By Chris Ziegler 
posted Nov 4th 2009 9:37AM
posted Nov 4th 2009 9:37AM
The good news: the alphanumeric dialer keypad was integrated into Symbian's codebase from a community-submitted suggestion.The bad news: it took a community-submitted suggestion to make the dialer keypad alphanumeric.
Chris +12
hahahahaha
Another moronic posting that completely fails to understand how the Symbian Foundation works. Very good, keep it up people. You can continue with your increasingly anal bashing of Symbian while they continue to dominate the smartphone market.
Fact 1: Nokia designed the dialler on S60 5th edition phones, not Symbian.
Fact 2: You only *need* letters on the dialler in the US market, since it's the only country in the world that uses the phone numbers encoded as words (i.e. 1-800-IRELLEVANT)
Fact 3: Symbian IS THE COMMUNITY.
This is a FAIL. Even more of a FAIL is the fact that there is a "new" version of the software updater, which will not install on Windows 7 unless you manually download it and set it to XP compatibility mode, then after you spend 20 minutes getting the damn thing installed you find out that your phone is already up to date and there has been no new software release for it in over two months. Again, FAIL.
Nokia seriously needs to fix major problems with the 5800 Xpress Music. This includes severe Blueooth issues that got worse with the latest firmware and keyboard problems. I think it is time to dump this thing, since apparently the 5800 crowd is not 'worthy' of the fixes.
The letters on the dialer have already been added to Symbian device in the last firmware updates (i8910HD and N97 for instance)
@Slappy Wag: Download Ovi Suite 2.0 and you won't have any problems with NSU and Windows 7.
I know having been living in Europe(Sweden) and Canada that it might sound weird to American, but alphanumeric dialer isn't used for anything(withTS phone) example in North Europe. So it's a bit of mobile phone culture(or cell phone;)).
That said could have been done faster no doubt.
I wonder if Maemo 5 and my future N900 will have alphanumeric dialer?
Well when you say northern Europe uses it then Denmark/Iceland and Germany don´t. Maybe Sweden uses the characters but not many others.
The only country that I know that does this is really the US. I wouldn´t mind the alphabet disappeared so why should it be a given?
really? ONLY the US uses it? r u sure?
i can understand maybe only we use vanity dialing. (why anyone else wouldnt, i dont know. it has obvious marketing advantages and i dont see any disadvantages.) but havent u ever had a need to use it for anything else?
i cant use TellMe (800-555-TELL) easily because u r asked to dial the first three letters of the service u want. for example, dial TRA for traffic. i also cant easily call moviefone (777-FILM) because it asks u to dial the first three letters of the movie u want. i cant easily access my medical plan info on the phone because u need to enter ur alphanumeric file number. i cant easily get travel tickets because i cant dial the city i want to go to. (i say easily because i eventually had to memorize what letters are on what keys).
there are countless examples of uses other than vanity dialing that people seem to forget about and i really dont know how any society lives without it unless they simply dont have such a vast array of automated phone services available to them. i can tell u that this is one of my biggest (yet so easily fixed by nokia) problems with my 5800. it is literally a daily inconvenience for me.
fine, if other people dont need it, spend 10 minutes programming a toggle option to turn it on/off. but to release phones in america that dont have basic locally used features and then wonder why you cant get phones to sell here?! come on nokia! im one of ur biggest fanboys but this is just ridiculously stupid! whether chris or brendan is right doesn't matter. the well taken point is that it should have been there all along.
usually when someone makes a product, another person eventually comes along and thinks of a way to make it even better. who came to america, took a telephone back, and was like "no, we dont need this part; lets just remove it"???
Hi, I'm Scott Weiss, UI Technology Manager at Symbian. I'd like to clear up a couple things about how we work: we are an open source software foundation, and all of our usability assessment, design, development, and most of our documentation come from the Symbian community. We don't have developers on staff, nor designers, nor usability researchers. My focus is to rally the community's support, and then do matchmaking with contributors to get the UI fixes and innovations into the platform. The alpha characters in the dialler was a logical oversight in the platform, we got the suggestion in the UI Brainstorm, and Ixonos agreed to code it. We showcased it as a case study because it's a nice little success story. The Single Tap improvements are another success story that is much more exciting, to be certain, but we want to acknowledge good work all the way 'round.
The cool thing is that if you want something changed in the Symbian UI, just suggest it and it can happen. Please keep sending us UI Brainstorms at http://symbianuibrainstorm.wordpress.com