Nokia should remember my settings

I got my new Nokia E90 from Vodafone. After leaving it in the back of that limo (bad call) in Las Vegas, I was without my primary number for about two weeks.

I set up the device quickly. I put in the sim card, called Vodafone, got them to activate the sim and bish, bash, bosh, the phone was operational.

Then I walked out the house to a social event arranged by my other half. She was driving so I sat in the car and used Mail For Exchange — which I’d downloaded from Nokia and Bluetoothed from the Apple — to synchronise my entire calendar, contacts, tasks on to the handset.

Perfect.

I *love* the simplicity. OK, so it’s not entirely that simple. I have to remember my rather annoyingly complicated username from Fasthosts and this is something that my mother, certainly, couldn’t be bothered to setup.

But it does work, and beautifully. In fact I have about 8 Nokia devices that are all synchronised in this way. It is genius. If I add a contact or a calendar entry on one device — or on Outlook, for example, it’s immediately synched across all phones.

Mail for Exchange renders me, more or less, device independent. I could use an N73 in the morning, an E61i at lunch and my E90 in the evening — all have the critical address book/calendar data synchronised continually.

But unfortunately we — that is, the industry, or, more precisely, Nokia — hasn’t evolved to the point of synchronisation of handset settings.

It’s a TOTAL ARSE when I try to type ‘Ewan’ with my new E90′s T9 and get two word choices: ‘Exam’ and ‘Exco’.

Screenshot0004

Surely it’d be quite easy for Nokia to create a .mac style system to take a copy of my phone dictionary and various other settings (themes, that sort of thing) and sync them from handset to handset via the web?

Or — perhaps since most people only get a handset every year (is that more or less still accurate nowadays?) maybe this isn’t such a big deal?

About Ewan

Ewan is Founder and Editor of Mobile Industry Review. He writes about a wide variety of industry issues and is usually active on Twitter most days. You can read more about him or reach him with these details.

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  • http://blog.spinvox.com James Whatley

    “Mail For Exchange

  • http://www.smstextnews.com Krystal

    Every year? People here don’t get new handsets every year, try every 3 years when their contract expires ;)

    Krystal’s last blog post..T-Mobile stupid STUPID billing STUPID system

  • Ewan

    Fair point, it’s not THAT simple, James!

  • http://mobileministrymagazine.com Antoine of MMM

    I have to agree that having an MS Exchange account when you review/use multiple mobiles does make things quite easy. I personally love that aspect of having an MS Exchange account.

    But its not always easy to take advantage of it. For example, M4E didn’t work on my N75 (latest version just didn’t work, and the version that did work didn’t sync). I use Emoze to handle things and have been quite pleased with it (aside from it being shutdown when RAM gets low, and the battery life drain). But the info accessibility is hard to beat.

    Antoine of MMM’s last blog post..Beginning of the Week Update

  • http://freshplastic.vox.com/ Anthony

    This is exactly what I was thinking today – A new N95 8GB arrived and I did the device sync thingy-majig with my old N73 and most settings (bookmarks, calender, messages and obviously.. contacts) were transferred: Just not the words I taught the T9! Argh!

    Anthony’s last blog post..Artistic touch… screen: Tux Paint-ing

  • http://www.bolseragency.com Ash

    Absolutely agree with the dictionary thing, it’s taken me ages to teach my N80 all the local names and jargon we use, not to mention swear words!
    Can’t someone devise a way to upload personal words? Then they could be downloaded to the new phone?
    Also other settings should be transferred to the phone in the same way as it can be on a PC.
    And finally shouldn’t there be someone develop a downloadable dictionary of words we all use but are possibly a bit risqu

  • http://digitalcraftsmen.net Denny

    Everybody knows that the Nokias desperately need a user-editable dictionary (I want to DELETE useless words, as well as adding more than a handful of my own words), with user-editable priorities for the order it suggests words in.

    Well, everyone except Nokia, apparently.