I realised that whilst I had a number of apps on my Satio, one of the things I had yet to do was buy them on the phone directly from Sony Ericsson’s PlayNow service. Which is quite an oversight, because app stores are kind of a big deal nowadays…

So what happens when you press that PlayNow button on your main menu? First of all, the browser fires up. It doesn’t however open one window, it opens two. One shows a mobile version of the PlayNow website, and the other is just blank. This isn’t immediately obvious because the Symbian browser doesn’t do tabs and there’s no user controllable way to open a new window, although once multiple windows are open you can switch between them via Menu > Display Options > Switch Window, which then gives whole page overviews of each open window that you can flick between. You can also close a window as well, as opposed to exiting the browser.

This two windows thing is nonsense. Firstly, one of the pages is entirely blank and navigating to it (which is pretty long winded) and then closing it proves that it’s not needed for the PlayNow store to work. The bigger problem though is that if you open up the PlayNow store and then you decide you don’t want to do anything in it, you’ll probably press the right softkey option, which is marked Close. The issue is that whilst it closes the PlayNow store window and drops you back to the main menu, it doesn’t close the blank window, it leaves it running, taking up memory, using the processor and ultimately, affecting the battery life. Might only be a little bit, but it all matters.

I can’t actually replicate this behaviour with other websites, which is good because it means if someone closes a window, they immediately see they have other windows still running and close them. The fact it doesn’t work this way for the PlayNow store shows that it needs a little bit of work done to it.

The next point for consideration is the whole experience of buying apps.

What happens when you reset your phone and lose an app you spent money on downloading? I tried this with one of the few apps in the store, Best Taskman (excellent little app by the way). When I purchased this, my network connection went out of range during the download and I was never able to get the file to finish downloading. I tried going to the My Account section of PlayNow, expecting to be able to download the file again. But guess what? It wasn’t there. No option to download again. I had to raise a ticket with support for them to credit it to my account so I could download it all over again.

That’s rubbish. Seriously, I want an iTunes style download-five-times type thing so I can at least re-download my apps should I lose them.

Or at the very least, give me a registration code, tied to my IMEI number or something like that. Because there isn’t one. It’s a one time download and that’s all. Pathetic.

I bought Best Taskman on a Thursday night. My ticket wasn’t responded to until the Saturday. Not exactly a good source of instant gratification.

All I can say at this point is that PlayNow is woefully inadequate.