craniac's place

I have had my latest mobile phone, a Nokia 6233, for some time now and my annoyance with Nokia’s implementation of the T9 predictive dictionary just keeps growing. It doesn’t learn! Yes, you can teach it new words, but it doesn’t learn by observing the frequency with which you use certain words. It will always suggest the same word for a key sequence, even if you always select a different word when you type that key sequence. A good example is my son’s name, Rory. The default word selected for the 7679 sequence is rosy, and with my previous phone, a Sony-Ericsson K700i, I only had to enter Rory as a new word and select it a few times before the phone learned that this was my preferred word for the key sequence, and started suggesting it by default. My Nokia phone steadfastly refuses to do so, always suggesting rosy. This is just one example and there are other common sequences I use far more often that I have problems with. I understand that this is true of all Nokia phones and it will make me wary of choosing Nokia next time I replace my phone. I will probably be wanting to go for a smartphone with a full keyboard, or preferably stylus entry, in which case a may buy Nokia. But if I end up with another standard keyboard phone it is unlikely to be a Nokia.

I have a few other problems with this phone.

• The combination of shiny silver keys and a blue backlight make it impossible to read the keys in bright light unless I hold the phone at a peculiar angle.
• The battery cover is a flimsy plastic thing that kept coming off when the phone was in my pocket and lowers the stylish, weighty feeling of quality of the phone. My very stylish solution to it coming off involves a piece of duct tape stuck on the back of the phone.
• Being a smartphone, albeit only a Symbian S40 one, it is reasonable to expect that the phone will be used for Internet browsing. The native browser is a rather clunky WAP browser and I have installed Opera Mini, which works perfectly. The only problem in this regard emanates from the ridiculously short time that the backlight comes on for each time a key is pressed, making it impossible to read a screen full of information without constantly pressing a key to turn the backlight back on.
• The charger has a very thin cable with a very soft rubber covering. Due to its flexibility it has developed a break in the cable where it joins onto the charger and it takes some jiggling to get it to charge. I will undoubtedly need to buy another charger before my phone is due for replacement. This is quite ridiculous considering that Nokia chargers have traditionally been quite robust. Whether they are trying to reduce wight or simply cut costs I think that they need to go back to a more robust cable.