My bad experience with Nokia

My first mobile was a Nokia 3310. Good phone, it made calls and sent SMS, decent battery, nothing to complain about.

A few years later, after becoming interested in the early Winmo 3-4-5 smartphones, I decided to buy an N95. It had been marketed to me by a few friends in Finland, as a killer phone. As a phone, it was great. The mp3 player and camera were pretty good too. That's it. I wanted a phone that would be great for Internet, and applications.

I remember back in 2006, Nokia people telling me that "Widsets" would be the future of the app market. They could make it easy for developers to create and distrubute apps to hundreds of millions of consumers. The service was extremely badly marketed. Yet, I did try it. I spent several days trying to get apps that would manage my Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress, Delicious, Skype, IM. None of that worked proprely. I tried many different applications. Nothing worked. Later I also tried Ovi, which didn't offer me a wide app offering, and made it very difficult to buy apps.

I looked into the Nokia Internet tablets, but I saw very poor app support, and also no support for phone calls (?). At that point I decided to give up and buy an iPhone.

I have to say I was quite surprised by the arrogant stance the company took regarding the iPhone. Most of their communication was calling their phones "iPhone killers", and belittled the achievements of Apple's first phone. It's almost as if the company was disconnected from reality.

Now the N900 is launched. Its app offering is still extremely poor. I was genuienly interested by the phone though, due to its open nature. I thought: since Nokia has great Bluetooth, and Video-out, I could use the phone as a replacement to my laptop! I'd have my office with me all the time in my pocket. I was even willing to sacrifice iPhone apps to use that feature.

It turned out the N900 was not so open after all, with an incomplete BT support. Requests from users for this feature on the forum were met with "how about you do it yourself?" remarks from Nokia staff. I also do not understand the company's persistence in not offering the Nokia Ovi Suite to Mac users. You would think that after several years of requests, they would respond.

I bought two Nokia Bluetooth headsets (BH604 and BH905), which were both expensive. I went to the Nokia flagship store in Helsinki, which offered them for twice the cost of online shops. When I mentioned that to the sales lady, she first said that was impossible, then almost insulted me when I proved the countrary by showing her the link on my phone. Both headsets broke within 6 months.

Recently, while using Nokia maps with my friends to go to a cottage, the service got us lost in the forest, by repeating contradictory directions.

In 2003, just prior to the launch of the Ngage, I was involved in some of the largest handheld gaming sites (Emuholic, Gp32emu). I remember talking to a very arrogant spokesperson at ECTS (back then the largest gaming trade show in Europe), telling me they "got the community" and had "killer technology".

As some of you may remember, the Ngage was a complete disaster. As a piece of hardware, the buttons were inadequate, you had to remove the battery to change games, etc. The game offering was extremely poor. It was an extremely bad phone as well, which brought the dreaded "Sidetalking" phenomena.

Nokia responded quickly in 2004 with the Ngage QD, saying that they "got it" and listened to the community. New features included cheap plastic, removed MP3 player, and lower phone call quality, without increasing the game offering.

In 2008, Ngage was relaunched. This time, Nokia said that they had been listening to the community and learned from their mistakes. The relaunched Ngage was strongly "inspired" by Xbox Live. It also featured an extremely poor game offering.

My experience of Nokia products and services is a series of disapointments. There is a consistant pattern of inferior products, which are marketed with false claims.  It's like the ex girlfriend who promises you that she fixed everything this time. And each time, I fell for it.

My attempts to submit feedback have been met systematically with aggressive response.

To date, I have never been able to play a high-quality game on a Nokia device, nor have I been able to use advanced web applications.