Wanted to share my experience, month two of owning the N95-8GB.
My main bone of contention with Nokia – is the fact that they cannot communicate. They would not find their way out of a paper bag. The big issue is with their software and services – the two things that are there to enforce the bond between you and the company and much more importantly, are there to convince you that your next phone should be Nokia.
First – there are a zillion PC Suites: NSeries PC Suite, Nokia PC Suite and now Ovi PC Suite. All ARE different but do the same things, mostly. Nobody tells you really which is best for what. Regardless of one you use – and I try all three on different computers – they all tend to crash a lot; may be Windows’ fault but you can always come up with the happy – ‘iTunes does not crash this often’. And they are crazy slow.
Another thing that is weird is that Nokia is so trigger happy to release updates to their suite of software applications that you end up downloading something new at least twice a week. If these were quick updates or monumental improvements, it would have been great, but these are tiny incremental changes that are barely noticeable. Applications still crash, applications still run slow.
A common bone of contention across applications and services is usability: did Nokia ever put their applications in front of users to test if they get what needs to be done and heck, what can be done? The applications look great. Nokia has its own distinct and elegant look and feel that can match Apple’s brushed steel style. But when it comes to simplicity – they are far from competitive even with open source products. Nokia Photos and Nokia Music, just do not make too much sense to me. Maybe they are geared for European audiences, but how difficult would it be to make photo print ordering work for the US or disabling the Nokia music store for countries it does not work in?
Finally – Nokia is trying to do really good things with its online Ovi sites. Ignoring the fact that you need separate logins to some Ovi services despite the same name, two things drive me crazy even in these generally good directions:
- You cannot get an RSS feed of your images. You can only embed a Flash widget in your blog (the Facebook app stopped working but really, who cares?)
- Ovi offers an awesome idea. Truly huge: calendar and contact repository for free. That means you can synchronize all phones, contact and calendar applications with the service, supposedly, with this single source. This can kill Microsoft Exchange or .mac if they try hard enough and make it work. But count on Nokia to blow this chance too. To synchronize you have to have a synchronization profile set up on your phone. You are supposed to get the profile via SMS/MMS when you sign up for the service. That does not work and there is no way that a somewhat savvy user like me can set the service up manually. Again, what the f- does Nokia’s Quality Assurance team do? Do they even exist?
I think Nokia is pretty much losing the relevance battle. The N97 looks great, but nothing more than a finer quality product than an HTC keyboard phone. Running the Symbian S60 OS puts it immediately at a speed and experience advantage to the iPhone, and worse yet, to its own great variant of Linux that runs on the N810 device, Meamo.
They will keep on making cheap bits of plastic, sell them to the third world and eek a profit there. 40% of the world market, but the less exciting and desirable 40% for sure.
