Nokia drops Lumia 900 price to $0 in response to bug outrage Nokia is hoping an emergency rebate program will mollify American consumers who rushed out and bought the company's new flagship Windows phone - only to get bitten by a serious wireless data bug. The Lumia 900 is Nokia's big comeback phone - and also Microsoft's biggest ever shot at the mainstream US market. It was launched at …
First we had the Osborne effect (announcing new products before they were ready, and killing sales of the old ones in the process); then, the Ratner effect (announcing the old products weren't good enough anyway); now we have the Ashton-Tate effect (when the new products arrive, they're broken).
Fix or no fix, find me a single salesman who's going to recommend a Lumia to punters now.
How much worse is it going to get?
You're also a reg reader, which puts you a cut above other IT sales guys.
I used to work for PC World. I've seen the bullshit first-hand. Selling hard on certain items not because they are good, but because of incentives.
It's the same all over. Not everybody has morals when they can get an extra £5 for selling a crappy item that the customer doesn't need, or a store bonus for selling X number of another item.
@alexh20:
> They get commission.
That was precisely the point.
> I'll find you thousands.
No you won't. You could walk into a phone shop and ask for a Lumia by name, and the salesmen would try and sell you something else. Reason is precisely that commission. The salesmen want to know that they're keeping it, without any quibble. Endless rounds of complaints, returns and refunds means a large amount of donkey work for them and the prospect of no money at the end of it all. That's what they've experienced so far with WP, and they're not stupid.
"How much worse is it going to get?"
Well, suppose that their only upcoming 2012 Symbian device (808 pureview) becomes a bestseller...
I'm sure we'll see some heads rolling in Nokia's PR departement soon, perhaps even their CEO might get some red cheeks (as he's the on who personally and prematurely declared that platform dead). It wouldn't surprise me if certain people won't get their bonusses this year ;-)
This from Engadget appears to be fairly typical:
"which confirmed that a small number of early handsets shipped with faulty software that caused memory management issues and eventually data connectivity woes. It insists this problem is now fixed, and that come April 16th, all affected consumers may swap their device at any AT&T store or merely download the update."
http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/10/nokia-makes-lumia-900-free-to-all-att-customers/
However, Nokia are indeed showing an unusual turn of speed on this one, their response being that anyone who has already bought it or buys before the 16th gets it, to all intents and purposes, free on contract. If it is the case that the number of customers actually effected is low then this may in fact do Nokia no harm. Indeed it may even do them some good. We have after all seen enough examples in recent times of companies at first denying that there is any problem and then when forced to admit to its existence, being very grudging about rectifying the situation. Nokia's fleetness of foot on this occasion may in fact turn the situation into positive publicity for them.
Right on the money!
I'd go further and say that Nokia/MS could be using this bug as an opportunity for giving their phones for free. If you want a massive market penetration, giving away the product -for a few days only- seems a very good move.
"Nokia/MS could be using this bug as an opportunity for giving their phones for free".
Errrr.... Let me educate you, MS fanboi. If you want to give a phone away for free with the goal being "a massive market penetration", then you just give it away. For free. There is no way that apologetically giving away a buggy, faulty phone will be for any other reason than damage limitation. It is unlikely, even in America, that people will be swayed to knowingly buy a faulty phone simply because the vendor is grovelling.
You're welcome.
Errm, it's not free.
The Verizon contract it's on, you end up paying $1000 for the phone. (actually $900 if you get the rebate).
The $0 is not real, even someone of limited intelligence should be able to see that. Although I guess if you are foolish enough to consider Windows Phone to be a viable alternative to Android or iOS, then perhaps you are too thick to work this out.
The bigger problem of course, is that the current Lumia phones are all dead end, they won't get upgrades to Windows Phone 8, which brings along the compatibility with the Windows 8 Tablet OS, so any apps you buy (not that there are many worth having on the Windows Phone Store), are as obsolete as your phone will be in 6 months time.
Well I've been telling time and again that Samsung's products are crap.
They only flood the market to make people belief that everything around is made by them. They only want to monopolize the market of consumer products.
They're the whore of Telecom. They fuck everybody and with everybody.
"They only flood the market to make people belief that everything around is made by them."
What an asinine comment. How exactly does that business plan work?
Let me translate your comment to make the stunning failure of logic clear.
"they only give their product away for cheap to make people think it is popular and that they are a business that makes money."
See the problem yet ? Probably not.
> giving them away...
And they may even try the trick they pulled on Spyglass* to avoid paying the manufacturer.
* Spyglass wrote Internet Explorer for Microsoft on the basis that they would receive a royalty payment (of $5.00 I think) for every copy sold. Microsoft then gave IE away for free** and thus did not give any money to Spyglass at all.
** In my view if it was included on the disk that they sold with Windows then it was part of the sale regardless that it said 'includes a free copy of IE' on the box.
It took about 4 months for Nokia to roll out a fix which stopped my Lumia 800 draining in about 18 hours. And if by misfortune the battery went dead it wouldn't wake up again even when I mains charged it. I had to trickle charge through a PC to coax it back to life. It's now working more on par with what I would expect of a smart phone though still nothing special.
What are you on about?
Sending this from a Lumia 800, which is the best Windows Phone device I've used (and I've used many, right from the beta devices used by Microsoft to develop Windows Phone) - even despite the poor battery life (hurry up deploying that fix Orange!) and occasional resets when making/receiving calls.
Wow 3 downvotes so far by idiots. Anyone who thinks Microsoft is incapable of making the UI "fit" really needs read their design docs. I'm not exactly pro WIndows but even I can figure out it's a conscious design choice and in practice its very clear what they were aiming for.
The run off is a design conceit which usually looks good, but it's annoying with contacts who have similar and long (Polish!) names which get cut off.
Off-topic: 3 downvotes for your entirely factual post? What is it with so many Reg posters? Y'all react like Pavlov's dog as soon as you see "M$".
And why is it that I find this to be utterly and completely pretentious, and indeed perhaps the single BIGGEST Eyesore yet devised by a Committee of complete dolts ever foisted on the masses of the general public at large?
Microsoft are ohh so oft accused of nicking "iDeas" from Apple, what a shame they couldn't be arsed this time 'round to actually create something more sensible then the Metro Interface.
Me thinks that perhaps that since I'm already skilled enough to use Linux on a daily basis (i.e. Command Line Linux not GUI!), that I might actually have to consider making it an OS option come the next 'round of Hardware Updates.
There just is no way I'm ready to give up the age old Start Button for a touchy-feelly Metro thing-a-ma-jig. that's as completely as ugly on a +24" LED Monitor as it is on a 3.5" Phone.
How do you miss a bug as big as that?
Not testing? or maybe they have a fleet of internal malcontents who would not bother doing anything about it if they did find out?
Either way, it is a management failure.
And yes, the response is uncharacteristically swift - but that should not engender praise: it is exactly the sort of response one ought to be able to expect.
Sooooooooooo lame, was always going to come to this the crappy Nokia and MS QA combine to give a fail as bad as the grip of death... guess they're just lucky nobody cares about Nokia in the US.
Good luck Nokia purchasers, on a 2-year deal, you may even get a decent OS by the end (though I wouldn't bet on it).
> you may even get a decent OS by the end
That is unlikely. WP7 is restricted to single core CPU both by directive from MS and by capability. It is also similarly restricted to 800x480.
The next WP is supposed to be WP8 based on Windows 8/WOA. This, however, seems to _require_ dual core. All current WP7 phones will be obsolete within a year as it seems they will never be able to get WP8.
Anyway with only 800x480 they will not match up to the current crop of Quarter-HD (960x540) phones, let alone higher resolutions which will come during this year.
>The next WP is supposed to be WP8 based on Windows 8/WOA. This, however, seems to _require_ dual core. All current WP7 phones will be obsolete within a year as it seems they will never be able to get WP8.
it doesn't require a duel core, it supports it, there's a big difference, various pieces of FUD out there have suggested that WP8 wont work on WP7 devices, there is no real evidence to suggest that, in fact there are reports of MS personnel saying that yes not all features from WP8 will hit 7. This sounds about right given that you would need to be stupid to think that by upgrading the OS you'll magically get a second CPU core. hardware dependant, WP7 will get some of the WP8 good news.
The tango update shortly to be releases has done a great job in lowering the spec needed for WP, meaning that with the release of WP8 there will be an OS that supports a much larger hardware base then it currently does.
This is a real real shame for Nokia. It is a massive PR disaster for them after such a huge launch.
Their share price shows they are in real trouble and they were pretty much putting it all on black with this phone in terms of high end devices. This is a real black eye and is going to cost them any traction they may have gained before the launch of the Galaxy S 3, the iPhone 5 and before people hear about the HTC One X
I wonder how much they are making on these devices now they are giving them away for nothing upfront? Anyone got any ideas how much the manufacturer sees of the money made on the typical 2 year contract?
Hey, it's <MS>. They don't know how to write secure or reliable code -- witness the appalling engineering practices they teach in *every single* MSDN example.
Google enjoy elegant code & map-reduce, I like OO composition & the strategy pattern, Microsoft are stuck back in 1983 at the IF statement with a hell of C-structs and undiagnosable pointer errors.
Didn't you notice how their advertising promised 'snappy performance'?
Where Google and Apple run LLVM or JVM virtual-machine opcodes, giving a fairly reliable & secure system.. Microsoft by comparison has unleashed its most junior team of Windows 3.0 C++ hacks. And you will suffer :-(
Blue screen of death, enjoy it on your Windows Phone, malware, viruses, coming here! Step right right up.
The Linux kernel gets on pretty well with if statements and C-structs.
MapReduce, Strategy and Composite are patterns, not languages. As such, they can be implemented in any language - even assembly language if you so desire (I have recognised Visitor, Composite, Factory, Facet and Flyweight in really old 68k code). However, I have seen too many contrary examples to believe your assertion that using design patterns extensively is the mark of good code - good coders like patterns because they solve common problems; bad coders like patterns because they can be used to obscure how ill-thought-out their code really is.
...and incidentally, Windows Phone 7 uses the same architectural pattern as Android - a bytecode VM running in a lightweight native-code VM.
You really have no clue.
The hardware on the 900 is lower-specced than the wife's iPhone. My Lumia 710 is lower-specced still, yet it easily outperforms her iPhone.
As for virtual machines and C++ you are aware, presumably, that java is the most common malware attack-vector? To the extent that most security experts recommend not using it. Ever.
One of the biggest gripes from developers is actually the *lack* of native code on WP7 as it uses *managed code*. My C# stuff also compiles down to virtual-machine op-codes. If you'd done even basic research that would have been obvious.
BSOD? Doesn't even exist on WP7. Literally not there.
Viruses? You must mean Android. Check out some Reg stories for more details.
Each ecosystem has it's ups and downs and adults can happily debate them. Uninformed MS-haters like you, though, are just an embarrassment I thought had been left behind in the school playground.
Offering the $100 rebate was probably unnecessary, as simply apologising, giving a fix date and offering an exchange would have satisfied pretty much all but the most unrealistic customers.
Still, it shows how important this launch is for Nokia. This phone is their main product for the US market, so everthing needs to go well.
Reading the attempts by Nokia and its apologists to put a positive spin on this I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
"We shipped a phone with a show-stopping bug; we didn't bother testing it properly; we made an egregious schoolboy blunder. Better still, the phone is our flagship product and the future of the company may depend on its success or failure. A strong release was imperative. But we fouled up like never before.
And here were are, offering an instant rebate and a speedy fix to everyone who bought one! What a great company! Other companies could learn from this! Wow! Awesome!"
Which ironically enough is also the supporting slogan which MS is using heavily with their Window Phones.
Quite frankly I think this will blow over. Sure; its a nasty bug and one which shouldn't even have been there. But if you play your cards right, which I think Nokia is doing here, then you can even turn a possible major setback into a marketing strategy.
I don't like the design of the Lumia myself (prefer Samsung) but this is a recommendable action!
Perhaps by the time they release the Nokia Lumia 5000 (following the 950, 1000, 1050...) they'll actually have tested it before release!?
- My g/f has the Lumia 610 which fails on the most basic of functions like "end call" and has to be turned off if the phone call was more than a few minutes long. Nokia took at least 2 months to work out the fix then released it in India with "other areas coming as demand dictates" - it still not being offered to UK punters!
- Then there's the 800 which has serious battery life problems for many and has the above bug too although seems less frequent on that one. Would think so for a phone that can cost £500.
- Finally we come to the 900 which just fails completely at being a phone for a "small number of users". If it was a genuine small number they'd not be giving refunds and $100 so publically.
Oddly they do make good phones, just not good smart phones and whoever runs the testing lab needs hanging by painful bits outside in the middle of a Finnish Winter.
The next O/S will be so improved .. more stable .. better features
repeat for next O/S
I always thought Windows ME was purposeful shit to tout Windows 2000 and eventually XP, when Win 98 SE served most people's purposes just fine ( never had a problem with it )
Having had a Lumia 800 for a few months, my conclusion is that it's actually pretty good hardware let down by the OS. I've experienced most of the bugs mentioned on the Nokia forums like the never ending call, poor battery life etc but they do seem to be gradually fixing these. What kills it for me is the small OS design issues that haven't been thought out properly. For example, not being able to set a static IP address on a wireless network - it's DHCP or bust which just seems a bit crap.
A small OS from Microsoft? How much is it worth?
Twice nothing is still nothing.
How much will you pay me to use it? Seriously, the only reason I use ANYTHING associated with Microsoft is because someone is forcing me to. I cannot recall the last time I voluntarily bought anything Microsoft was selling. The ONLY good thing I can think of to say about Microsoft is that they have done a little good against the spammers on the upstream end.
> How do you miss a bug as big as that?
>
> Not testing? or maybe they have a fleet of internal malcontents who would not bother
> doing anything about it if they did find out?
>
> Either way, it is a management failure.
The company that doesn't do software unites the the company that doesn't test software... and yes, this is what you get.
If the bug only affected a few early users after the launch, it's because you would have to pay any sane person to take one of these Nokia Stupidphones. Even giving them away doesn't make them attractive. It's like pig on a lipstick.
Well done Nokia, you have entirely met my expectations. Magnificent, truly and utterly magnificent.
They already marketed their product when it wasn't ready. When you became a customer, you got a free mobile phone as well as 240 DM credit for your bill. Subscription cost nearly 10 DM a month with a minimum subscription duration of 24 months....
So... you got a free phone. They were quite popular for the few weeks they did it.
When Elop joined Nokia, he effectively had the choice between the leading smartphone OS, Android, and the trailing one from his previous employer, the seventh generation attempt at a smartphone OS from Microsoft.
The fact that he chose the one that was falling off the bottom of the graph tells you all you need to know. To expect anything decent from this platform is futile.
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