nokia

Extreme disatisfaction and dissapointment does not even begin to describe my feelings towards Nokia.

My first phone, like many people my age and older, was a Nokia. I was very fond of Nokia phones, they were extremely user friendly and were very robust in design. I dropped my Nokia countless times and it continued to work with no problems.

Eventually came a day when I lost my Nokia 3200, heartbroken I was. My parents did not want to buy me another Nokia phone and decided to purchase me a Panasonic due to pricing, it was the crappiest phone I had owned to this date. I was so unhappy with my parent's decision, I really liked Nokia phones.

There soon came a period when the operating systems on other brands started catching up in usability, when eventually it was obvious that my panasonic was no longer useable, I obtained a Sony Ericson which I was quite content with. It looked nice, fitted nicely in my hand and more importantly the user interface was pretty reliable (like a Nokia I thought).

After 2 years, it was time to renew my contract and finally, Nokia has some great phones out with great reviews, pffft who needs an overpriced iPhone when my Nokia E71 looks and performs better (cheaper too).

Oh how I was wrong, don't get me wrong, I still think iPhones are overpriced luxury goods that are more pleasing to the eye than reliable, but Nokias? hoho.

Recently, my Nokia started freezing (I've had it for just over a year). The off button had become my best friend, the interface was so slow that I would often assume it had just frozen. Not only that, it has stopped displaying the names of the people who sms me and also just today, an error message saying I don't have enough memory to accept smses starting appearing even though I have a 16gb memory stick in use. Sometimes I would press the accept call button whilst a call was coming through just to have the phone freeze on me.

e71 is also meant to have a multilanguage dictionary which is hardly multilanguage at all. I downloaded dictionary languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean just to see that my phone could not display the characters. Ridiculous I thought, must be some sort of mistake? I contacted Nokia just to have them tell me that these languages will only work for their region that use East Asian language operating systems, which means they can display English as well as any language that uses the Latin Alphabet as well as their native languages, whilst we can't view them. I searched for language patches and hacks to no avail.

But what was puzzling was, this explanation was far from satisfactory, Nokia had no operations in Korea durring the development of the e71 as far as I know. But there is a downloadable Korean dictionary. According to them, the only place with phones that would be able to view Korean was Korea, but Nokia didn't have phones in Korea...what the hell is the point of having a downloadable dictionary when none of your phones can display the characters?

There is also no Timer on the e71, this basic function just simply does not exist on the phone.

Bottom line is, Nokia software (Symbian) is crap. It seems to degrade overtime and is far from reliable, especially for an e71 that is meant to be a business phone.

As a result, I have lost all loyalty towards Nokia and will be moving to HTC Android phones as soon as my contract expires, somehow I think Nokia's new open source project is too little too late. Its a shame, a company once known for its reliability and innovation has ended up like this.