S60 Open to new features

Being able to extend a phone with 3rd party applications is often seen as the key benefit of the S60 platform. It’s easy to understand why this characteristic has become so popular in marketing the S60: who would not want to have a phone that suits your needs and daily tasks even better?

From the user’s perspective there are, however, a couple of steps in the purchasing-installing-using process that make the utilization of these applications harder than it should be (this is based on my experiences as a researcher and user– and not on any particular research). These steps include:

1. Finding these applications seems to be quite hard for most of the potential users. The applications are just “out there” and only some people with special knowledge about technological things find their way there. Applications that an average user most probably finds are the ones on the Seiska's back cover (a gossip magazine in Finland).

2. When the user wants to change her phone, the problems begin: Will I be able to move these applications, themes etc. (that I have already payed for) to my new device? How can I do it? Where are the installation files? On my phone’s memory, on the memory stick, as a attachment in a message or have I deleted them?

I have met users who have simply accepted that they can’t utilize the applications they purchased because they don’t know if it’s possible or how they could do it if it were possible.

I think the following things could be done in order to enhance the User Experience of 3rd party applications:

1. Organizing and storing files should be more intuitive in S60. Most people store and organize files in folders, why could this not be the case with S60?

2. In each application there could be a built-in option like “Move this application to another device”.

Naturally there are ways to handle these issues (like the PC suite and File Manager), but it does not seem to be intuitive enough for an average user...