Posts by Meeee

Finnish PM rules out Nokia rescue package

Finnish Hucksters

Let's remember: the N8 was the last best Symbian effort from Nokia. And it's a dog of a phone. Utterly unreliable, eats its battery in 6 hours, erases user data and applications, crashes more than once per day. And coincidentally a short while after launch the Nokia shops were shut, the fake user support disappeared... and clearly the Finnish hucksters had run to the bank with the money leaving their user base high and dry. There was a famous blog post from a Nokia blogger twat about how he was on a junket to a Nokia conference and couldn't be assed to respond to user problem reports. That's how the Finnish hucksters operated.

Good riddance to bad rubbish. Which smartphone user would buy Nokia again?

My next phone will not be a Nokia. Lots of other people's phones will also not be Nokias. The Finnish hucksters are gone.

Nokia: The first year of the Elopcalypse

"I think when Andrew was talking about "developers liking the tools" he's talking in general, not just Nokia in-house" - Precisely. I couldn't give a rat's ass whether Nokia's in-house SW developers are happy given the crap they've released to be put on mobiles over the past few years. Any short-circuit of that write-and-forget bunch can't be bad. "Nokia can't do software" is all their doing. The one good thing I can see coming from this alliance is that the people who produce applications that will not run on their own hardware are being kept away from the party.

The article gives a reasonable assessment. I'd like to see an actual hand-on review of one of the new Nokia phones. The hardware might be seductive, the day-glo colours a siren call... but does the damn thing work? That's what I want to know. I'm the unfortunate owner of an N8, which has to be the dumbest, stupidest smartphone around. It takes a few days of setting up Ovi accounts, downloading and installing apps and so on to get a feel for how a phone works, or in the case of the N8, to plumb the depths of Nokia's incompetence. Some of that is down to how utterly shit Symbian is, even after all the investment in it, but more of it is a result of not having done any testing. I could give a blow by blow account of all the problems the N8 has, but it would just take up too much space. The phone is shit and nothing is going to fix it.

In an alliance like Nokia and Microsofts' normally people look for "synergies", and companies who are a good fit for each other compensate each others weaknesses with their strengths. The big problem going forward is that neither Nokia nor Windows have a good reputation for testing their products. So there's no reason not to expect that the customers will once again be alpha-testers for products that are immature and defective.

The other problem that I expect hasn;t been fixed is Nokia's customer service. Major bug reports to date have been ignored, is there any reason to believe that this will change?

Maybe Nokia can make it in the feature phone business, but I think they've screwed themselves so badly in the smartphone market that they have no chance there. After my N8 I've decided my next phone will not be a Nokia. The things that are important for smartphones... like applications that work, regular updates, bugfixes, ease of installation of apps (from PCs and Macs), and especially not emptying the batteries in less than 8 hours... have been completely ignored by Nokia. Particularly over the past year, Nokia smartphone users have had the Ovi slammed in their faces. Having wasted $500 on an N8 those sods aren't going to get a second chance any time soon from me.

What a load of crap. Did you ever use a Symbian ^3 phone?

An email client is about more than "usefull widgets on screen", how about some actual funcionality like actually getting the damn email? The "fetch frequency" setting (e.g. "soonest", "every 15 minutes", etc) does absolutely nothing, the email client download emails only when you open it. A third-grader could program a better one.

How about an app that isn't third-party, like Chat, eh? Written by the same ass-hats who wrote the mail app, it freezes on opening on my N8. Every time. That's Nokia programming quality for you.

Oh and by the way, try using the touchscreen keypad... it's hopelessly imprecise, every second word is guaranteed to be mis-spelt. OK some bright young thing thought that it would be useful to have the letter you pressed pop-up on the screen... good marks for trying, none for execution, having the letter flashed on the screen for all of 10 milliseconds isn't much help now, is it?

Symbian IS dog-slow, there's a lag of over a second for any action, and the wait after locking the screen for everything to go dark is painful. And it doesn't even give you good battery life to compensate, my N8 will empty its batteries in under 8 hours. That's if I don't use it much. If I do it's more like 5-6 hours.

You're talking a whole load of frippery, FM radio, Bluetooth and what-not... if they couldn't get the fundamentals right, simple things like the signal strength indicator, or not blocking the data connections, multiple crashes per day... forget about the rest of it.

There's a simple lesson here: Nokia can't do software. Also: Nokia can't do testing.

Apple confirmed as buyer of 3D mapping firm

Nah, none of this "make of that that you will" stuff... here it is, plain and simple:

There goes the last possible reason to buy a Nokia phone, the offline mapping, enhanced reality, 3D rendering stuff.

There goes the last jewel in Nokia's crown, the mapping business, which was probably worth more than the rest put together. Complete lack of strategic vision... Nokia's toast... burnt together with its platforms.