Mobile Info Planet

OK, picture this.

You are at the office. You leave your desk for a minute and have left your S60 powered Symbian smartphone on the desk. At that moment an alarm/notification goes off, it can be your alarm-app or your calendar, it doesn't matter which.

Now tell me what's wrong with that picture?

...

You don't see it? It is probably because you have never owned a Symbian device then.

So let me tell you what's wrong.

Firstly, the alarm won't sound simply for a brief second as it does on, say Windows Mobile, but will instead sound continually for about 30 seconds, to the delight of your co-workers who probably love listening to your phone alarm for half a minute while you are away.

Secondly, and much worse, when you come back to your desk and check your phone for any missed events, the alarm you just missed (because it certainly didn't go unnoticed by your co-workers) is gone; in other words, you don't get ANY notification of ANY kind that you just missed an alarm. Nothing, nada, zilch. As if it never happened.

Your only hope is to be around when the alarm automatically goes off again next time, in N minutes (which is configurable), which it will do for a total of 6 times. After that, you are out of luck.

But, some might say, since the alarm sounds again in N minutes you will most likely get it on the second, or third, or forth go.
Granted, 9 times out of 10 you will. But it is that 10th time that matters: when you are in the theater and you silenced your phone, or you left your phone at home for a couple of hours, or you simply kept you phone deep in your winter coat and you didn't hear the alarm. It is on those occasions it makes all the difference in the world because then you will miss it.

There is nothing "smart" (as in "smartphone") about handling alarms in this fashion. I have stated before that I am PIM guy, and this is such a big flaw that I literally sold my last Nokia because of this. I tried several 3rd party alarm apps but there was no solution.

But still, as I stated in another post, I really like Symbian because it does everything else really well, and it is the fastest and the most stable OS around. Because of this, and the new Nokia E72 that is about to be launched, I am thinking about trying to look past that flaw and learn to live with it.

Will I?
We'll see.