[SailfishDevel] No consistency across screens

[Chris Walker]

I've had the phone for a week now and overall, I'm not impressed. It
lacks some of the screen simplicity and clarity that my N900 has. An
example is the text message screen. There is very little distinction
between messages apart from a dull time/date.

That seems to be a common theme across the various screens. An example
of that is the email app settings screen. I've just tried to create an
email account without success. There is no way to know why the thing
won't accept the settings. I assumed I had done everything correctly
but when I went to the email app itself, I was told that no accounts
had been created.

Fearing that it was just my inability to do stuff on the phone, I
handed it to one of my sons who is a Human Factors specialist i.e. he
advises his company on better ways to interact with equipment.

His initial comments are as follows :-
1. Front screen - no labels on second screen (phone, messages, browser
and camera) except when dragged up slightly. [I can see no logic for
that whatsoever. It seems to reply on familiarity with the phone but as
I've only had it for a few days, that familiarity is not there].
2. No obvious way to get to a URL in the browser [I think this is
because of the poor distinction between text and background mentioned
above].
3. No indication of which pane you're looking at [again, that seems to
rely on familiarity].
4. No way to interact with things in the browser e.g. save a picture.
5. Power level and 2G/3G signal off page - only visible when moving
between 2 panes.

I know that some of these things have been mentioned by others e.g. the
battery level on the front screen but so much of the phone seems to be
a 'work in progress' that it seems to have been rushed out too early. I
bought the phone in order to support Jolla but it seems that they're
not helping themselves by lacking consistency across the various
screens. Perhaps that's a function of a smaller company with
individuals not working cheek-by-jowl as they might be in a bigger
company.

I don't want to end on a sour note so let me say that I don't mind the
People app, that is, once I had managed to import all the contacts from
the N900 but I did have to resort to some perl to add the \r\n between
the various contacts. One question here. When I did an import on day 1
of just one VCF, the app showed the icon for that person but having had
to reset the phone back to factory settings before it would do any
updates, it now shows 'Add your favourites'. Where is the logic in that?

Another question! Can I import the SMS messages from the N900 to the
Jolla? If so, can somebody point me to a 'howto'? I was hoping that I
could retrieve them from a backup of the N900 but how do I use them on
the Jolla?