Despite of the numerous disadvantages that a buggy Nokia N97 has — even after firmware updates — like daily battery pulls, resistive touch screen and freezing to name a few. For whatever reason, I have made it my primary all-in-one mobile device. This is pretty embarrassing but not its not until recently that I figured out how to add subject headers to text and multimedia messages.
As cheek reddening as it may be, I blame the cryptic Symbian OS that has grown on me over the years for burying the option unintuitively and to be fair my laziness/ineptitude.
You see before, whenever I sent my good friend I.P. Freely an MMS of my latest cheesy movie find. There was no subject header, unless accessed and selected from the within the Options menu.
Naturally being the ultra-organized individual that I.P. Freely was, he was not happy that I did not include a subject header so that he could quickly discern what the message was about without having to open it on his N95-2. I can dig that, its just one more step that negates instant information gratification. It also bugged me since I could not figure out why his older Symbian powered phone could add subjects on the fly and mine could not.
Finally making an effort to poke around in the Options menu, I noticed >Message header fields.
Behold! There was not only that pesky Subject header that had eluded me but also a Cc and Bcc field.
So after a few months of usage, I now was able to add subjects to messages. I know what you’re thinking, why didn’t I just Google it? I guess I could have, but things should just work a little more intuitively out of the box. Oh and Manual, what manual? But that’s probably too much to ask from a Symbian device. I never noticed the missing subject headers when iPhone users would text me, because its threaded conversation feature handles replies to text messages as new and separate message.
I also noticed that any of the header fields selected in a previous post, show up in a new post. Which can be quite handy or a nuisance.
There you have it. I guess you do learn something new everyday. I have not used any Symbian ^3 device as I am waiting for the Nokia N8 E7. I am definitely waving the awesome camera for the keyboard which suits my needs better. Its going to be interesting to see how ^3 handles subject titles and other stuff. Until then its more frustrating fun with S60 V5!
Update: 12/22/2010
Guess what? I figured out that once you enter text in the Subject field, the text message is automatically converted to MMS! Now I no longer need to “insert” an image to prevent long text messages from breaking up due to the 160-character limit. This comes in handy for those times when I want to send a 400-character text message. The N97’s hardware keyboard makes it s snap to type those up, so its easy to get carried away.
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