The Nokia Guide

What’s the best way of implementing media keys on a Candybar?

Point number 2 of my recent post: “The 10 reasons why the N82 isn’t perfect ” mentions that something that the N82 lacks are media keys. This got me thinking:  On sliders like the N95 it’s been pretty much solved by doing a dual slide design which houses media keys, but how should these be implemented on a Mono block device like the N82?

1. Slide-out top-mounted media keys: The N95’s slide-out design works perfectly, so why not do the same for a mono block device like the N82? This could be done by having a small slide-out portion at the top of the device.

2. Traditional side-mounted keys: This is probably one of the more traditional ways of adding media keys: placing keys on the sides of the phone. Peter Rullmann from the Humane Computing blog suggests that side-mounted media keys on the mono block devices like the N82, would Not only to control the music player but also to start a voice recording.

3. Sliding front cover. A similar idea was implemented on the N91 and N91 8GB which in fact were candybar devices with a sliding front cover.

4. Stealth keys surrounding the D-pad, which were implemented on the N81 series of devices and soon to be released N96.

In my opinion the raison the etre for candybar devices is having a sturdy and compact devices and having slide-out (point 1) and slide-to-cover solutions like the N91 (point 4) would work well, but would add unnecessary moving parts which candybar lovers are VERY sensitive about. Stealth keys like the N81 don’t work so well as it all has the be pushed into a very tiny space and it also increases the chance of accidentally pressing the wrong keys. Based on this, I would say that tradional side-mounted media keys stay true to what candybars are all about, while still adding the convenience of media control. What do you think is the best way of implementing media keys on a Candybar design like the N82?

Getting a new phone means losing every single purchased N-Gage game!

Over at Allaboutngage there’s a well-written article indicating something that I personally wasn’t aware of: your N-Gage library is locked to the original handset forever. I always thought that my purchased games would somehow be linked to my N-Gage account, but as it turns out getting a new phone means losing every single purchased game! The article goes on suggesting that Nokia should fix by either doing game activation by consulting Nokia's servers or Linking games to a single N-Gage account, and linking that account to a single phone.  Personally, I won’t be making a single purchase until this is sorted. What do you think? How should the N-Gage system deal with game purchases, activation and transfer?