[[!tag usability rant]]

I have a Nokia E61 phone. It's one of the flat, wide ones, with a big screen and QWERTY keyboard. It's the second best phone I've ever extensively used. It has its problems, though. For example, it takes up to five seconds for it to display a new text message, timed from when I press the button to indicate that I want to see it.

Five seconds. To show a few dozen bytes of text. Five. Seconds. To. Show. A. Text. Message. Five. Fünf. Fem. Viisi. Five. Count them: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

It doesn't always take five seconds. Sometimes it only takes three. That's still a lot of time to wait.

The device can play MP3 files. Surely it should be able to show a few words of text in less than a second.

The best phone I've ever used was the Nokia 1631. In 1997. Everything was more or less instantaneous. (Also, every button had one purpose: you did not have to consult a menu to see what it does.) In a decade, no-one seems to have come up with a better phone. That makes me sad.