Thursday 10 February 2011

"Finland, We Have a Problem!"

Nokia is fat approaching a stage where they will be outgun and outsold in terms of their popularity in them releasing reliable softwares and innovative handsets. Take a look at the news and you will notice that Android is fast becoming the number one OS in the market followed by Nokia's Symbian.

Somehow I just don't understand why Nokia is not releasing better handsets than other manufacturer! Lately, we have newer and better handsets from Samsung, LG and HTC but you would not hear any flashing handsets coming from Nokia apart from the Nokia N8. As rumoured, the N9 mightnot set foot on any soil at all due to the arrival of the mighty E7.

Just look at the latest C- series. They do not have autofocus cameras! Who would want to pay around £300 for a mobile phone which uses fixed focus anymore? Come on Nokia!!! I have looked at the C6-01 and the C7-01. They are both reasonable phones but with the price range, consumers can equally buy a better phone like the LG Optimus and HTC Wildfire among others. Even the so called "dead" Motorola is coming back with a vengence with their Motorola Defy! They will be releasing the Motorola Atrix very soon and boy, it is a small marvel!

Besides these few manufacturers, we also have the nearly "dead" Sony Ericsson which they are going to release the SE Arc! Just look at the specifications of all the phones which I have mentioned and compare it to Nokia's C6 and C7. I don't think people will take preference over Nokia in the given situation though. As for budget phones, people would most probably go for the Orange San Francisco. It is £99 on pay as you go with £10 top up but you can easily unlock the phone free! After that, you can just root it and flash it with a generic ROM which will allow not just European language support but also Chinese input and output! Tha't so much better as compared to Nokia!

The problem with Nokia is that they will split the language packs of each phone to its region. I think that is wrong. No wonder consumers will nevertheless buy the Apple Iphone as it does support more than 30 languages without the need to reflash the phone! Can't Nokia do the same when they have the resources?

At this very moment, I could most probably say that only the N8 and the X6 are worthy handsets to purchase when you really look into it. As for C6 and C7, forget about it though. With the late release of a proper and stable fix to the many firmware problems plagued by Nokia, no wonder people will just choose other handset. I did have problems with the N8 as it was quite unstable when I first purchased it. At this moment, even with the PR1.1, I am still having troubles with third party softwares like Nimbuzz and Skype as they will crash off and on when I try to use them both at the same time. One solution would be to install both softwares on different drives, i.e. Nimbuzz on the memory card and skype on the mass memory.

Nokia is a reputable brand and being a leader is difficult when other manufaturers are trying to take the pole position. Nokia must improve on their software development - fixed the bugs before releasing a mobile phone and don't take too long to release a new handset! I would not buy a HTC as they have issues with their loudspeakers and also their battery usage.

Before I end, I hope that Nokia will release better mobile phones in the future and for God's sake, please include an autofocus digital camera of 8MP and above with an LED flash at least and a larger battery! Nokia should have installed the 1500mAh battery of the E71/E72/E73 onto the N8! It's such a shame as the N8 is a good phone but plagued by a dodgy battery and also the instable Symbian OS ^3. To be fair on them though - They have released an improvement firmware recently. I hope that they will release the PR2.0 at the end of this month. This is because a person's patience has its limits especially when you consider that you are trying to migrate from the Apple Iphone 4 platform to Nokia's Symbian ^3 which is so much slower and buggy than the Iphone 4!

Henceforth, I'm still with Nokia though. I have faith in them. Please do something good for your customers!!!

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