Teach the technophobe: Challenge no 1

Nokia’s Teach the Technophobe: Eight brave Nokia fans have signed up to help some close friends and family join the messaging generation using the E75. Their technophobes will negotiate various hurdles and challenges. The one who finishes this training to the best of their ability will win their coach the opportunity to trial five E75s for their community.

THE TECHNOPHOBE: Dr Chantal Lourenco — esteemed medical practitioner, budding health economist, wife to geek. While fairly competent with most forms of technology, has been known to glaze over when faced with matching the audio, video and device inputs on the home theatre system. She’s a middle-of-the-road user. Form usually beats function and geek cred is worth squat. A perfect technophobe.

CHALLENGE No 1: Set up an email account on the new Nokia E75 and send a test mail.

Completed! I must say, I personally have mixed feelings about the E75, but it’s proving an instant hit with Chantal. The email functionality is vastly improved and one-click set-up for any email account is a tantalising proposition.

My technophobe set up her Gmail account and was receiving and sending mail in under five minutes. Just a username and password. POP, IMAP and other protocols (which would have elicited a dirty look rather than a quizzical attempt to reconfigure) are completely hidden from the user.

With the E75 slide-out keyboard and landscape tilt, reading and responding to email is a breeze. It even allows you to group by subject — as close as you’ll get to Gmail’s genius of grouping conversations together. You do tend to realise when taking part in a competition like this though … that to the ordinary wife in the street, grouping by conversations is not really important in the grander scheme of things.

Myself on the other hand. Epic fail. My first attempt to set up corporate Outlook failed. I think more because of security certificates on my side (any help to get around this?). My first attempt to set up Gmail failed. The app crashed but evidently completed most of the set-up anyway because mails began streaming in. My second attempt to set up corporate Outlook will be today.

Wife 1 | Geek 0 | Nokia E75 0.5

Email is invasive, let’s get that out the way. But there is a peculiar quality to having your life stream onto your phone. I’ve avoided it up till now but a device like the E75 might just change my mind. Not to say I didn’t try email on my current E71, but the interface you’re provided with to read the mails is so completely inferior to the Gmail for Mobile app, that it never took off.

WOMWorld should have received our test mail. The next challenge awaits. Bring it.

More on the Teach the Technophobe competition on AndyHadfield.com