#Nokia: build a phone for a loyal customer

Dear Nokia,

I’ve been a loyal customer since the late 90s. I have fond memories of my first phone, a 9000i Communicator. It was the size and weight of a Sky+ remote control. Oh how my friends laughed. But I knew they were wrong. My phone had a keyboard. I could TELNET on it, something they couldn’t even dream of, and there was even a passable browser. It had what at the time felt like a huge, high resolution screen. It was the future in a box, and I loved it.

Over the next few years I had several Communicators, each slicker and faster than the last. It was more than a phone, it was a mobile communications device. Email on the move, imagine that! The menu system was fantasic and the phones never crashed; they were miles better than anything the competition could come up with.

Unfortunately the communicators got expensive and the range was discontinued, and I fell out of love with phones that had moving parts – the hinge went on my 9000i several times and needed repairs. So I had a few years with average simple Nokias – never a problem, but nothing inspiring.

I loved my N80 when I got it, but it seems just weeks later the N95 was released. I had to wait 18 long months before I could get my hands on one. The N96 was just about to launch but I didn’t care, I had to have the N95 (a decision I’m still happy with). I loved that phone for 2 whole years, easily the class of the field with its superb camera, acres of memory for MP3s and videos, tolerable web browser (although I did end up using Opera). Selling it was a sad day in my life.

But by the middle of 2009 it was clear that the N95 didn’t really cut it any more. The iPhone had been out showing the world what a phone could be, and I’d had a work Blackberry for long enough to know how good email and connectivity should be. I have to admit I wasn’t blown away by the options from Nokia, although for a short while my deepest desire was for an N97; contract expiry couldn’t come soon enough.

But then, the news that should have been game-changing: the N900. A true Linux ‘phone’ – no, not a phone, a mini computer. A machine with a decent screen and keyboard. Real multi-tasking. X-terminals! Firefox web browser! This would be the phone to end all phones. I had to have it.

But it didn’t come out in September as promised. Or October… Eventually, mine arrived in December, amid rumours of non-functional microphones, USB chargers/data ports falling out, and poor battery life.

Forunately my hardware was fine, except for the battery life. Barely 6 hours just sitting doing nothing with the screen off – God help you if you wanted to listen to music or use the Wi-Fi. But it was feature-rich, everything worked, and I could fit more stuff on it than I could dream of. It had more space than my aging home PC, and the web browser was almost as fast. I loved it.

For about 2 weeks.

The battery life was irritating but manageable. What is unforgiveable is that the phone is basically stillborn. Barely out of the wrapper, Nokia dropped support for the Maemo operating system, thus killing off applications development interest. What interesting apps there are, require command-line hackery and dangerous kernel patches. It’s linux yes, but it’s like linux from the mid-90s, with all the danger and risk that entailed… Not the modern Ubuntu-class experience you’d expect.

Irritating features of the phone, like only having 5 levels of screen brightness in a display capable of far better, became even more annoying when Nokia refuse to consider improving the functionality or even enable porting of older 3rd party Maemo brightness apps to the N900. It lacks even the most basic features such as ring-tones personalisable per contact, no support for MMS, and has just 2 profiles, one of which is Silent, and you can’t add more. WTF? Maybe that was going to be a feature released later, but Maemo is dead, so we’re all SOL.

What kind of flagship phone has no features, no development, no future? What kind of company tempts its loyal fans into a technological cul-de-sac and then abandons them there?

iPhone killer? Don’t be absurd. Now I’m stuck with this dead end device until Christmas 2011 when my contract expires. I feel cheated, taken advantage of, embarrased to have raved about this phone to my friends.

So Nokia, I challenge you: build me a phone that is worthy of my loyalty. A phone clearly the class of the field like the N95 was when it launched. A phone with the battery life and connectivity of a Blackberry, with the features, applications and support – long term support – of the iPhone. A phone that I can use to browse the web, run popular applications built by professionals and launched simultaneously with RIM/Apple versions, use command-line ssh to get into a server to fix it when I’m on the train, whilst listening to my thousand-CD equivalent MP3 collection, still with space for a season’s worth of Doctor Who downloaded from iPlayer. A phone that acts as a WiFi hub for my other devices without having to patch the kernel or run the battery down in 2 hours.

You have 12 months. Don’t disappoint me. I really don’t want to end such a long term committed relationship, but you’ve let me down really badly this time. Don’t do it again.

2010

07/27

CATEGORY

corporate stupidity
n900
obsolescence
tech

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