too many words by laura lemay

new phone not laura-proof

My new Nokia cell phone has a little mini-joystick in the middle of the phone that replaces the standard Nokia up and down buttons. Its actually a really cool UI feature in that you can navigate in all four directions with it and also click it like a mouse.

Clicking it brings up a shortcut menu with the most common operations for the current screen view. This is really useful for most things, but I’ve discovered a small problem.

Say you start at the main phone screen. Clicking the joystick brings up the contacts list. Clicking again selects the first item in the list, which I have set to be a shortcut to my email address so I can send pictures to myself quickly. Clicking that item twice creates a new email message. Clicking from there sends that email and returns you to the main phone screen.

The phone is set up so that if you press and hold the joystick, it sends repeated clicks, over and over again, until you stop pressing. I’m sure you’ve figured out by now where I’m going with this.

Of course if you lock the keys on the phone, it won’t do this, but I have a problem remembering to do that (and as far as I’ve found the phone doesn’t have an autolock on it). So this morning I apparently put the phone in my bag and apparently put the bag in the car in such a way that it was happily clicking away and sending me email for the entirety of my hour-long commute.

T-mobile email messages cost me 20 cents a pop. This was an expensive lesson in LOCK YOUR PHONE, LAURA.