Another classic fail on Nokia's part!
Nokia has announced closure dates for Mosh and Widsets through e-mails and news releases along with the eventual replacement of these services by the new Ovi Store.
However, the smarts at Nokia have not included anything about when the Ovi Store is actually going to launch. Everywhere I read, it says the store is set to launch in May - but what's the date mate!??
A quick search of the Nokia website only adds to the ineptitude: http://europe.nokia.com/A41447096?qt=ovi+store+launch+date&x=19&y=8
In my opinion, the only thing going for Nokia is the fact that S60 has multi-tasking and some of their phones support US 3G (AT&T).
Nokia, you are really trying hard to **bleep** me off:
Customers are screaming what they want to see in the phones - but the honchos are too busy squandering their riches from the past (Programs which work in Silos like Nokia contacts, Friendview, etc).
Specific rants:
1. Ditch the cheap plastic cases - seriously! They are obvious and cheesy - N85 is a big fail because of it.
2. Use capacitive touch - I don't care what the hell your engineers say. Spend one hour with the iPhone and you will see how effortless capacitive is versus resistive.
3. Promote a standardized look and feel for apps through your SDK. Maintain customer expectation/experience and quality across all apps - created by Nokia or by a third-party developer. Does it even occur to you that’s one primary reason the iphone is so popular?
4. E71 - the camera is a joke compared to N73 which is three years older. This is not the precedent you want to set. News to you - technology should move forward - not backwards. The iPhone with a 2MP camera without flash takes phenomenally better pictures in daylight – after 3 E71 firmware updates. Get it? Fire the e71 camera division. It’s even worse when Nokia does not even accept they screwed up. And you wonder why Nokia has no market share in the US (hint the 5800 launch fiasco).
5. Firmware updates across the board!? E61 – just 3 years old – is a business phone. The browser sucks. It crashes all the time or runs out of memory. It’s an older version. UPDATE it! I paid $450 for that. You can’t leave it in the dirt after two years of half-hearted support. Why are your firmware updates 6 months apart? It’s unacceptable. The market and internet is evolving too fast for you to sit on your butt; either reduce the number of devices per service line (that’s another story) if you can’t handle them or hire more/smarter people.
6. EMEA, NAM, etc f/w update versions. Based on the updates you shoot out every 3-6 months, your QA guys are probably smoking crack. Even obvious fails slip through them. I can understand that hardware may differ over region-specific phones but it doesn’t warrant 3 month gaps between the region specific updates. Learn from your competitors – because these things will eat you. The end of your domination is already here – accept it to change things around. The 5800 alone will not save you and based on your price-range to specs for N97, I won’t count on it either (LED instead of Xenon for a $700 phone?).
7. Widgets. Do you remember 2 years ago at an announcement – you mentioned that there will be widgets which will let users input their flight details and the widget will alert then about its arrival or departure delays, airport conditions, etc? The services to offer this information are already here – e.g. FlightStats.com. But I don’t see the widgets anywhere?! What happened? Good idea/selling point but sounds like someone fell asleep. This should have been afocus of multitasking capability in a phone.
8. E-series. Aah… the award-winning phone that no credible reviewer had the balls to take a pock shot at. Instead, reviewers sounded like they were done a favor by getting to play with review handsets by justifing the poor camera, ‘oh it’s a business phone; its primary function is not to take pictures.’ If that’s the case, then why the hell does it pack a **bleep** e-mail client for 4 years even on its newest iteration? And why does the phone not recognize calendar invites!? Even gmail has worked that **bleep** out. Inexcusable! Do you guys use your own devices in a non-Nokia centric environment at all? I didn’t think so. BTW, Nokia email is a paid for app eventually, it is not a replacement for the inbuilt messaging client. A client and service are two different entities and should be maintained so if you want people to use your devices anywhere. For e.g. your browser doesn’t just work with your servers now, does it?
9. RAM. Why do your phones even today have miniscule amounts of RAM – usually just enough to get by - even though the prices have dropped exponentially?
10. Call log – how did you manage to screw this up even more? Call log used to work fine on the E61. But with the FP1 / E71, every incoming call is shown as a ‘cell phone icon’ even if the number is associated with a land line. Also why are you not using different icons for work, home, cell phones? Is that rocket science? BTW, what’s QA been up to – at this point you might want to call a narcotics raid on them. Don’t get me wrong, you had it working right a few years back. I know you’re new to it but repeat after me: technology should move forward - not backwards – with time.
11. Call log 2 – Where does all the information related to the call log get hidden? Because when I used synble, I noticed that ir was able to extract a hell of a lot more information from the call log than the phone's client. This is just sick. Winmo phones allow you to store THIRTY days worth of information. Not only that, I can go into a contact, and view my call history for that contact including durations for every call as long as it was all within the 30-day limit. Obviously synble has managed to pull a lot of it out from my E71. But shouldn't this have been part of your phone? So tell me, do you use any phones from your competitor at all? It might be wise to make a few purchases now. Plus if you want to learn from your competitior, you have to use it as your primary phone for 30 days and then go back to a Nokia and see what you can improve. This is the EASIEST way to improve/add features without investing into any 'smart' people for R&D and probably should have been your first step.
12. Call log 3 – You know how right after you’ve called a contact or received a call, you want to try to call that contact again but at another number from the contact profile? Well guess what – you have to go through the address book to look at the other numbers. Yes, you can’t open the contact profile or alternate calling numbers from the call log itself. **bleep**? Talk about basic UI workflow/routing design. At this point, I’m beginning to think you have someone on the design/QA team with a mild narcolepsy problem.
13. Contacts – Have you ever noticed how ‘easy’ it is to ‘delete’ a contact but hard to undo? I would think by the 5th iteration of S60 you would have got that down to a pat. I can hit the ‘back’ key and get a prompt to hit delete a contact. Nice. But if it’s a mistake, then what? I’m outta luck until the next time I sync. Plus, if my phone is set to sync automatically, then I will lose the information from my PC as well if it comes in range with my computer (I use Bluetooth and sutosync) or if I forget about restoring the information before I re-sync. Did it EVER #$%# occur to you that if you want to make deletion easy you have to make recovery just as easy, huh? Didn't think so. I am now beginning to think, Nokia folks secretly don't use their own phones.
14. Contacts 2: While we’re at it. If you begin to edit a contact and mid-way you decide to ‘cancel’ or discard all changes made to the contact (you haven’t saved yet). There is no way to do that. Seriously. I am sure many of you have noticed that by now – on FP1 at least – which is not that old and has seen tens of updates. From Nokia’s perspective, you probably want to ‘save’ all information on-the-fly as a user is typing to prevent accidental loss; which is a good thing. But would it kill ya' to also add a function to ‘discard’ all changes and revert back to previously saved version of the contact on the phone. It’s not rocket science again. UAT (User Acceptance Testing) – That should have caught this. You might want to schedule a talk with the department head.
15. Standard bookmarks in the browser that can’t be deleted. You asked for the hacking of your firmware. Because those bookmarks are useless and have never offered anything REMOTELY useful. They should have been removed from the browser by the second iteration 4 years ago. Or you should have built a team to develop content that's not discontenting. Besides, what’s wrong with allowing people rearrange those bookmarks? Plus the morons had to go right ahead and build a SEPARATE bookmark item for each link instead of putting them all in one folder called ‘Nokia’s junk’? You should be ashamed of yourselves. Instead of glorifying what you've accomplishe, how about spending some time over the failures? Because it looks like they are being carried over iteration after iteration.
I can go on forever, but I am gonna stop here – cause as usual – you are probably not listening. But for your sake I hope you do!
Times have changed; it’s not just about the hardware anymore – but more about the software. Also, if you can’t make your software to interact with non-nokia phones over the internet then you’re wasting your time (Nokia Friendview, etc). There are many platforms to compute - the internet has always been social and your time as a leader has already been squandered.
This vent was written in 10 minutes – so please excuse typos.
PS What's the ovi launch date?
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