maemo.org - Talk - Jolla User Experience Thread

Hi

New jolla user. Here's my review after almost 1 month of usage. This is just a software review. For the record, I've been a n900 and n9 user before.

TL;DR: I miss the n9, jolla needs to do a *lot* of catching up.

Overall the OS seems more modern than the n9, I'm not very fond of the excessive usage of transparency, but I guess things like peeking and such work better this way. I understand the n9 went through a couple of updates to reach the state it's in now and in those updates a lot of polishment went it. Also, nokia probably had much more people working on the project than jolla, so that made it possible to push more stuff on the updates. It's good to see jolla seems commited to update regularly and not like nokia which only promised 3 updates or so and it something wasn't finished by then you where on your own.

OS:
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There are still many rough edges in the OS itself, for example:
- Everytime I set up an ambience and reboot, it's gone and only the ones that came with the phone show up in the ambience view. The ambience itself in use is still working, but other's I've created disappear. This is probably because of database corruption of something like that.
- Chat notification sounds interrupt music. This is really bad since I have to silence chat apps when listening to music or get pretty frustrated.
- No service apps allowed in the store? For example, in the n9 I had a scrobbler for last.fm that run in the background. The jolla one needs my interaction to start. Not good. This is probably limiting other apps out there too.
- Copy paste: Please finish this off, so I can copy-paste on all apps. It's frustrating whenever I cannot copy text from some app to anther.
- MTP protocol: Usb mass storage worked MUCH more reliable.

Things I miss from the n9:
- The events view was customizable: For example, the calendar feed, the weather widget, etc. I miss all that information in a simple peak. The new updates view is nice and more organized but needs much more interaction to view stuff and it's missing more information (weather? calendar?).
- More than 9 covers view. I've read the reasoning behind the design of this and for me it's not really a good excuse but rather the way you move around (vertically instead of horizontally like it was done in the n9). This would be more obvious if the brower's tab worked like on the n9.

Apps:
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On the app side, there are still plenty of polishment to do. This is what bothers me most because from the launch date, n9 had some very good core apps. Jolla on the other hand seems to be playing the "you can run andoid apps" card. The core apps are very basic compared to the n9 counter parts and lack polish:

- The gallery app: You can only share 1 image. This is ridiculous. When I take pictures on trips and then go to put them on facebook, I will use a laptop to upload from the phone because it's not funny to upload 50 images one by one. Editing images is limited, the n9 had more options and plugins.
- The music app: It's very basic compared to the n9's. I'm missing recent albums list, most played, etc that are easy to achieve with tracker as it was done on the n9. Also, I cannot understand the logic on the search functionally. On the album view you can search *only* by album name (on the n9 it would show matching results for both artists and albums but would present the album results matches). On the artists view no search at all. Why? I also miss the playback buttons on the cover the n9 had. Using the cover view of the music app doesn't cut it because it involves much more effort on my part.
- Browser app: I prefered the each tab is a new window, since it integrates better with the application switch view. Now that it's limited to only 9 maybe it's not such a good idea. The browser itself is nice and it's getting better.
- Maps app: Compared to n9 maps is terrible. I miss offline maps. I'm in a trip on the US and I used that before to find places without the need of data, now it's not possible.
- Calendar app: The calendar and the accounts integration has many bugs, I had to restart setting my accounts from scratch 3-4 times before I had my caldav account with gmail & facebook events all showing up. This also happened on my n9, so I'm guessing the implementation details are very similar and share the same bugs. Seems like it hasn't gotten a lot of testing. Only month & day view.
- Email app: I miss the thread view.

Non-core apps I miss from the n9:
- The world clock app by nokia: This could probably be easily done by jolla and it's usefull from traveling.
- Nineshark: I think it's in the works.
- Xbmc Remote: It's in the works, but AFAIK the developer doesn't have a jolla device.
- Nokia Public Transport: A more global transportation app would be nice, I see there are some local ones.

My suggestion here: Jolla should reach the best 3rd party apps developers from n9 and offer them discounts. I think this was done to an extent, but they should push harder, after all jolla needs more native apps ASAP. Right now there are more interesting apps in openrepos than in the store, not good for jolla. This is probably a consecuence of store policy rules like no bg services which clearly are bogus and need fixing.

I could probably go on, but I think it's already been covered elsewhere. I just hope the effort to get to the point where the n9 was is reached soon enough because had I known all of this I would probably had waited longer to make the switch.