"declined to respond"?
They're sure he got the message, and he wasn't on a four week holiday or something?
Nokia has formally requested the return of prototype phones from off-message Russian website operator Eldar Murtazin. Nokia says it doesn't want to close down the long-running site Mobile-Review, but ominously says it has asked the Russian authorities for assistance. Which means Eldar could be being getting ready for a swim in …
"...posted a much-quoted and highly critical review of the company's N8 phone in April, forcing the company into a premature announcement."
Are you so naive to think his review forced Nokia into a premature announcement? Public announcement of this scale is impossible to launch in a day. It is exactly opposite: he _knew_ planned announcement date and timed his review exactly to make maximum noise...
So they hand out gear for p/review. So they send a mail asking for it back, implicitly or explicitly "revoking authorization". So they claim it is "unauthorized" because he didn't respond to the email, saying he "declined to respond".
What the true story is, including whether and if so how they determined all that, is left as an excercise. So far they're making waves, perhaps trusting nobody will do any fact checking.
James 47 ... I think they meant Nokia is Finnish :-)
kurtus: when Apple "lost" that iPhone 4 and the pictures appeared all over the web revealing details of functionality that Apple was testing for inclusion in their final release iPhone 4, it led to a lot of rushing around in Apple about how to handle that sort of thing ... with the N8 I'm sure it was very similar ... that in the six months before a phone is officially released, a lot of functionality is tested on pre-release phones, and (one hopes) anything particularly buggy is dropped from the final release phone, colours change, different screen finishes are tried etc. so while Nokia may or may not have been about to announce the N8 (I have no idea), it's very likely that the phone they were going to announce wouldn't have all the same features (and same bugs!) as the one that our Russian friend "leaked".
Having worked in a similar industry, I know that these prototype phones tend to be full of debugging code (and so run much slower and using more memory) and that the chips inside may well also be prototype chips (graphics accelerators, bluetooth radios etc.) which are being tested too ... and if they fail, then there is a backup plan of changing the hardware back to a slightly older but reliable chip, and adjusting the code accordingly.
Having published a "highly critical" review of a prototype, I'm guessing Nokia had to jump forward with damage limitation ... and in a market where phones are mostly popular for only a few months before the next "best phone ever" shows up ... premature (and bad) publicity could kill a phone.