Okay guys this is only my second post so I make no great claims to community membership...but in a way that is my point.
In many ways I am a 'typical punter'. I have a reasonable technical knowledge to a 'lay' standard...that is I am not a professional and hold no qualifications but I have been using PCs/smartphones, etc, for many years.
Recently, two weeks ago, I bought an N97. It came pre-loaded with the then latest firmware, version 11.something and, when it worked, it was good enough to make up for all the bugs, crashes, freezes and frustrations of when it didn't.
However, having had the phone for two weeks, or so, this has changed. All I want to do is what any 'typical punter' would want to do...personalise the phone, transfer music files to it, surf the web; typical smartphone functions. But, here's the rub, the whole 'Nokia experience' is so user hostile as to beggar belief. Ignoring the utterly illogical, random scatter, system of locating functions on the N97: meaning that you have to guess where any particular option can be found if you want to change something on the phone or fruitlessly hunt for ages through menu after menu until it's unearthed, what on earth was Nokia thinking when they put together the Ovi/Pc Suite?
I have just wasted a morning trying to transfer music from my PC to my phone. The music is all from CDs that I own and that have been ripped on to the PC, so no DRM issues or download format problems. However, importing them to Nokia music still managed to scatter every compilation album by artist. Foolishly I thought I would try to correct this by going to the 'troubleshooter' and, indeed, there amongst the topics was the very one I was looking for. Unfortunately the advice it gave was characteristic of a fortune cookie not technical assistance...'this is because the artists are different, right click and manually edit artist details'. Okay, I paraphrase, but that is a fairly accurate representation of the advice given, about as much use as a widget on an N97 in other words.
However, if that's not enough, the customer is faced with a choice between the Ovi suite 'music view', the Nokia music application and the Nokia music manager application, all of which share only a single characteristic: they are utterly unfriendly. Having plumped for the music manager (that sounds like it should manage music collections, I thought) I managed to get all my music to appear in a list and to select it. By this stage I had given up on ever seeing any album art (other than Elvis' number 1 hits, for some reason) and reconciled myself to having each of my 'Greatest Hits' albums represented as 17 different albums on the device, but despair was beginning to set in. Nevertheless, having achieved this limited amount, I then selected 'copy to phone'.
The first time: the 'manager' crashed. The second time: it told me that my empty N97 had insufficient memory (cheked destination...was the big old E drive). Still I persisted. I decided to lower my goals and selected only a single album to send. Guess what, even with only a handful of megs to send...it was still out of memory.
Thing is, by this time I'd lost interest/the will to live. Why was I having to dig into all these applications to perform a simple function? From a customer viewpoint, what is Nokia doing? I am willing to concede that I am no Symbian expert, but if the only people who can use their devices are Symbian pros, Nokia really are doomed.
Which brings me on to my last, and main, point. Nokia is deafeningly silent about all this. My phone, and, unless I miss my guess, the phones of a great many people here and blogging across the web are not working correctly, and are little short of hopeless in many cases. Like me, they'll be wondering what the point of a widget on the frontscreen of the phone is if all it does is display several words of news from three days ago and a weather forecast from a week ago Tuesday, why they have to keep taking the battery out to reset the phone when it freezes, how long they have to wait before said back snaps or breaks a lug in the process and what those funny lines on their camera lense are? Why should those people be expected to waste their time hunting for new firmware or software updates online or put up with a third rate product? Surely the emphasis sits with Nokia to reach out to us and explain what it is doing and why they released a phone and software that could not have cleared beta testing. Isn't this the action of a responsible company?
Can't see myself buying Nokia again, and I have already put off anyone who'll listen about the whole experience. I have had some laughs though, eh?
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