Disappointed with Symbian Belle! Pros vs Cons

Question

I accept that I'm probably in the minority here, as a lot of you seem to be banging on about how great Belle is, but I personally dislike it! In fact, I would go as far as saying I HATE Symbian Belle, after coming from Symbian Anna!
First of all, I'd like to point out that I do appreciate the good points of Belle. I like the fact that they finally sorted out a few issues which plagued earlier Symbian^3 versions. However, some of the major issues seem to have been left unchecked, whilst I feel other aspects have been changed unnecessarily.
After 15 months of owning a Nokia N8, I kind of expected all of the bugs to have been worked out by now, but it seems that 15 months later we are still complaining about many of the issues which we complained about on day one!
I could also live with some of the minor annoyances I have found with Belle, but some are just so frustrating that I often wonder why the hell they decided to change it, especially when it didn't need to be changed in the first place! The clock and the music player homescreen widget are two such features I feel didn't need to be altered, yet they did so anyway just for the sake of it...
After just 24 hours of updating to Belle, I've decided that if I can't find a way back to Anna (I hear that a Nokia service centre can perform the downgrade), then I'm getting rid of my N8. As much as I love my N8 to bits, I cannot live with it with an interface that I am unhappy with, especially when Anna felt like second nature to me! My beloved handset has been altered, and this is no longer the phone I sent the last 15 months using
Here's what I like about Belle:
* Extra homescreens - For me, three was always plenty, but I can see why other people would prefer to have more. However, it would be nice to have three as the default, rather than four, as I am left with an unused screen which is unnecessary for my use
* The ability to rearrange homescreen widgets more freely - I like this feature, and it's something I initially thought was going to be a feature of Symbian^3 when the N8 was first released. Being able to finally place shortcuts anywhere on the screen is very useful, and more intuitive than having to have rows of four
* The dropdown menu - This is a nice touch, and puts all of the most important on / off features in one place (such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth etc). However, I wish that this was a one-touch operation, rather than a touch & flick gesture
* Speed - General transitions and navigation are so much more faster now! As it should have been to begin with...
Anything else which I like (like the faster browser and vertical QWERTY keyboard) are throwbacks from Anna, so I won't mention them here as they don't relate directly to Belle
Here's a list of the things I dislike about Belle:
* Redesigned homescreen widgets - Was there really any need to redesign the primary homescreen widgets, such as the clock / calendar / profile menu group, and music player? On Anna, these were nice neat little widgets which occupied two rows between them - Now the music player widget takes up half the screen, and the clock / calendar / profile group has been disbanded into separate widgets which all take up extra space! Why was this necessary?
* Redesigned digital clock - I don't like the new-look digital clock on the homescreen, and I especially don't like the new screensaver digital clock! At least give us a choice of Anna / Belle designs, so we can choose which one we prefer! I much prefer the original screensaver clock design, and I would rather have the original clock / calendar / profile menu group back in place of separate widgets for each!
* The new text messaging interface - More specifically, the text messaging menu. For some reason, Nokia have assumed that everybody texts using the Conversations feature, and has relegated everything else to a secondary menu option to show the various text message folders. To me this is a big no-no! I like to be organised, but I don't want to keep having to switch to folder view whenever I want to manage my texts, especially when this used to be the default view when I hit the text messaging button!
* New navigation icons and icon locations - Using Belle has become a cryptic guessing game! Navigation icons seem to have been moved around, and the icons changed. More time is spent deciphering what the icons are and what they do, rather than being quick and easy. For a Symbian newcomer, I'm sure they'll pick it up easily, but for a Symbian veteran coming from Symbian^3 / Anna to Belle, they just cause confusion! I'm scared to touch a new icon in case it does something undesired!
* Lack of default application folders - I know, I know, there's the ability to create folders, but who the hell decided that removing default application folders was a good idea in the first place? All of my nicely organised applications have been scattered into one main group! Again, for what logistical reason?
* Headphones no longer work - Like many people, I prefer to use my own choice of headphones, rather than those basic ones that come bundled with the N8. However, after updating to Belle, I find that my headphones no longer work! The sound is not diverted to the 3.5mm jack, and music just plays through the device speaker rather than the headphones which are plugged in. I tried them out on other devices, and they work fine, and they worked fine before I updated to Belle, so this is obviousy an issue which needs to be addressed
* Homescreen wallpaper pictures obscured by navigation bar - Previously, the pictures I use as my homescreen wallpapers fit nicely between the navigation bar along the bottom, and the info bar along the top. With Belle this is no longer the case, where the picture is extended, and these two bars obscure the image below (the navigation bar happens to be semi-transparent, but that's beside the point)
* Application screen button right above the physical button - I honestly don't see the point in having a button in the bottom left corner which does the exact same thing as the physical button on the N8 which is situated directly below it.
* Profile ordering - On previous Symbian handsets, and also previously with Symbian^3 / Anna, it was possible to order your profiles however you wanted. There was also more than four default profiles. However, with Belle it seems that if you rename any of those first four, they retain their position, regardless of alphabetisation. For example, if you created a fifth profile called "Silent (Office)", it would appear in fifth place, rather than directly beneath "Silent" as you would expect
* Renaming the default "Silent" profile conflicts with the dropdown menu function - If you rename the default "Silent" profile to something else (Ie, "Loud"), and also change the profile settings (such as turning the volume right up), then this renders the silence feature in the dropdown menu redundant! You can still select the "Silent" function from the dropdown menu, but it will activate / deactivate whatever profile occupies that second slot, regardless of whether you have it set as silent or something else
* The camera interface - Once again, an example of moving icons when they didn't need to be moved! I used to find that the location of the various camera settings was perfect with Anna, but now they're all along the bottom. Why did they need to be moved? This is perhaps just nitpicking, and doesn't really bother me as much as other changes, but I see no reason why some things need to be changed for the sake of changing things!
Things that needed to be fixed, and still haven't:
* Calculator - In this day and age a smartphone should have an advanced calculator, similar to many hi-end scientific calculators. At the very least, a basic calculator shoud have a "clear screen" button! We shouldn't have to exit the application and relaunch it in order to do a new calculation!
* The music player - Artists and Albums should be separate. End of! If youre choosing a new ringtone, you can browse by either Song, Artist, or Album, so why isn't this the same for the music player? This has annoyed me ever since I first got my N8, but seems like something Nokia are reluctant to fix, despite complaints from the majority of users. Also, why is there still no user-definable equaliser?

Answer 1

bumblebirra wrote:
GeminiPhoenix, you make plenty of valid points, but I think you need to try to give Belle a chance and then you might start noticing small things like the ability to simply delete any unwanted homescreens, and then it might begin to grow on you. I can understand your frustration at what you feel have been unnecessary changes (to Belle itself) but... well, I guess it must have been a MAJORLY serious age-old problem that forced you to risk the upgrade.
Your complaints about the Belle widgets are all justified and hopefully Nokia are listening and will do something about them in due course.
Even though I'd like more widgets, and more implementations of various settings into widgets, I find Belle to be be intuitive enough to make it an enjoyable experience - no less than Anna anyway.
I agree, Nokia should give the option to revert back to previous operating systems.
If I loved Anna so much, I wouldn't have cared less for latest and fastest software for my device. It would have taken a very serious problem to make me take the risk of changing it.
I admit I may have jumped the gun on one or two issues, and I have since discovered how to delete unwanted homescreens. However, this just proves that the option is well hidden away in a very specific place, where I would have probably not looked had someone not directed me to it. Therefore I formerly retract that issue from my list, but I will add that I feel such options should be more visible, especially as we don't have a user manual to flick through and we're expected to just figure this stuff out on our own!
I have also discovered that the Wi-Fi needs to be prioritised in order to automatically connect when in range of my home network. Again, this is not made clear, and the required settings are hidden away in an obscure folder where most normal people wouldn't think to look... I also retract this from my list
As for the "age-old problem" - This thread should answer everything:
/t5/Messaging-Email-Browsing-and/Urgent-help-required-N8-refuses-to-send-text-messages-after-6/td-p/...
It was indeed a serious problem, and the only way to fix it was to update to the newest software version. No doubt the problem will occur again in a few months time, and I'll have to do the same again...
However, where I initially aimed to fix one problem, Belle has posed several new ones, such as the headphones no longer working, and the text messaging interface being rearranged based on the assumption that everyone texts using the Conversations feature. Two things I use every single day, and pretty much everywhere I go.
I am also glad that you support my complaints about the widgets, so thank you. I know they're only minor issues, but they're the most used, and I fail to understand why they decided to change certain ones. The whole widget system overhaul is great, but it's ruined by the larger widgets which formerly used to be much more compact. For example, the music player and eMail widgets are the largest and most waste of space, whereas the clock / calendar / profile cluster was perfect, so why separate them so that they take up twice as much space on the homescreen?
I too hope they're paying attention, and I have openly shared my thoughts with the Nokia team via Twitter. I would suggest everyone else does the same if they feel the same way
I liked Anna. Whlist I did miss the old PR 1.2 icons, and disliked the coloured blobs, I could live with it. I thought Belle would be more of the same, with just a few tweaks here and there to things that needed fixing, but it seems like something entirely different. At the very least, I expected certain things to stay the same, with the improvements being under-the-hood so to speak
As I have said before, certain aspects didn't need touching. They were perfectly fine as they were. Belle would function just as well if they had've left the widgets as they were. I appreciate that they've done a lot of work making certain aspects run faster, but some things weren't broken, so why try to fix them? Even more frustrating is the fact that other issues have yet again been ignored, such as the terrible music player interface, which almost everybody wants changing back to something similar to the S60 v5.0 era