Email, SMS and voice notes

[Guest Wizard]

Some general feedback, comments welcome.

It took me a little while to realise that when composing a text message the message needs to go in the subject line. I think the user interface would benefit from making that rather clearer. e.g. of all recipients are SMS recipients and the subject is blank and the body contains some text, warn the user, or even better hide the bodytext edit box.

When using IMAP4 email, I would like to see the folders that contain new email highlighted in bold. I have a number of folders that new email arrives into and right now to check my mail I have to go into a folder, go back to the folder list, back into a folder, etc. Right now it tells me I have X new messages, but I have to manually look for them in each of my folders.

When using IMAP I would much prefer the default screen for email to be the folders screen, not the Inbox. I have personal email, business email, and each has its own folder. I then have additional folders for email to other addresses (mainly for business) and the SPV really doesn't handle this so well because of these minor user interface issues (default to the folder screen, embolden folders with new emails). For a nice email folder implementation, look at www.fastmail.fm.

I am seeing a rendering issue whilst composing messages. Sometimes (about half the time) I find that when editing a message's subject, the edit box gets confused and starts rendering the cursor in a different place to the text, so I can't see the wood for the trees because the character I am deleting is only partially deleted and what I see doesn't match what the SPV thinks it is displaying (according to what happens when I edit). A way to resolve it is to jump to another field and jump back, but it's extremely irritating. This combined with the SPV's enthusiasm for locking up for 1-2 seconds whilst typing out an SMS makes it downright bloody irritating to use.

When I read my email I find that the Back button is irritatingly inconsistent. If I go to email and click Back, I go to the home page, which is as expected. If I go to an email message and then click Back, I go to the folder, which is also as expected. BUT if I go to the folder list, go into a folder, and then click Back - I GO TO THE HOME PAGE, which is really very confusing indeed. I use the folder list as my key reference point for email, just like the folder list in Outlook and I expect it to work the same way.

With IMAP4 I notice that if I delete a message and reconnect to the server the deleted messages are not removed from the server. I'd like to see an option so this can be enabled. It seems that if I delete a message on the phone it often comes back when the phone re-checks the mail server.

The email Inbox easily gets out of hand with a lot of messages. With IMAP4 it is common to move messages that have been dealt with into another folder. In the same way that Hotmail has a simple facility to move messages between folders, I'd like to see that on Smartphone. The benefit is that it becomes much easier to deal with higher volumes of email and much easier to see which emails have been dealt with when you read the email from a desktop PC at a later date. Although a simple feature, the ability to move emails between folders on an IMAP server is an extreely easy way to make the SPV much more suitable for handling higher volumes of email.

If I attach a recording to a message, this is allowed even if the recipient is an SMS recipient. I sent one to an SMS recipient by accident, and it would have been useful for that option to be greyed out or for a warning to be shown. "You cannot send voice recordings by SMS".

When I attach a recording to a message, the phone beeps at the start and beeps at the end of recording. Some of that beep is recorded by the handset and is very clearly (almost painfully) audible in the resulting email. It's very loud indeed and leaves the feature rather rough around the edges.

Sometimes I'd like to be able to read SMS separately from emails, especially if I get too many emails in one day. I would also like to see SMS messages stand out as being different from emails as it's not usually clear to me which is which.

On my IMAP4 server I have a handful of folders alongside the standard ones. If I open a folder called "MyEmail" in Outlook Express is it shown as "MyEmail" but if I open it on the Smartphone it shows as "Inbox.MyEmail". I'd prefer to see folders like this lose the "Inbox." at the front. It may make sense to group all of these non-standard folders alphabetically after the standard ones on the small screen. fastmail.fm do this to great effect in their interface where they show all the standard folders first (inbox, sent items, outbox, etc) and then following that all the custom folders in alphabetical order.

It's great to see the features the SPV provides in a handset, and I hope to see some of these improvements in future releases.

Wizard, MVP ASP.NET

[Guest Danlance]

It took me a little while to realise that when composing a text message the message needs to go in the subject line. I think the user interface would benefit from making that rather clearer. e.g. of all recipients are SMS recipients and the subject is blank and the body contains some text, warn the user, or even better hide the bodytext edit box.

I think you're wrong here - the message within the body always seems to get sent for me (at least people replying seem to have read what I have put...) :D

[Guest Wizard]

Interesting. So what happens if you put something in both fields?

Wizard

[Guest Emad]

You get the Subject field, then the message, ie:

Subject: Hello,

Message: How are you?

Would be:

Hello, How are you.

Or something along those lines..

[Guest Wizard]

To me, that is pretty unintuitive. "oh yes, the recipient will receive the subject and the body with a comma in between" - it's just not intuitive.

I would prefer there to be only one box for sending sms. I assume both the subject and body are present for when messages are sent to both email and sms recipients, so in that scenario showing both makes sense. But if all recipients are SMS recipients, why show the two edit boxes? The mental model most people have for an SMS includes only a) a recipient and :D some text - the introduction of "subject" just confuses things. I am a foolish idiot of course which is why it fooled me, but these devices need to be designed so people can just pick them up and use them.

It's the little things that frustrate. e.g. Nokia have a huge market share and what does the SPV do, it *swaps* the keys for typing a space and for cycling through t9 matches. *why*? Consistency is such a huge factor in successful interface design and yet there are many areas where the SmartPhone just does it differently and it makes it incredibly hard to use. After a week with the SPV I still find myself cursing it because I'm pressing the keys the way they are laid out on my old Nokia.

Wizard

[Guest Danlance]

the T9 key swapping really annoyed me aswell - its not quite so bad once you're used to it, but its still annoying...

Can't say the subject thing botherered me too much - tho it moight be more intuitive not to have subject for SMS...

[Guest Bazz]

It took me a little while to realise that when composing a text message the message needs to go in the subject line. I think the user interface would benefit from making that rather clearer. e.g. of all recipients are SMS recipients and the subject is blank and the body contains some text, warn the user, or even better hide the bodytext edit box.

Never had this. Don't use the subject line when SMSing. It probably needs to be in one or the other not both.