Recently I have been wondering, whether Nokia is losing it or no?
I’ve always been a fan of Nokia devices and S60 and I still continue to be. But of late Nokia is acting a little too weird, making me wonder the above.
But why am I saying this? Well let me elaborate,
Xenon v/s LED:
After the N82 and the 6220 Classic, Nokia did not release a Xenon flash based phone, despite people (bloggers) stating that the Xenon flash was way better. Nokia instead came out with dual LED flash, stating that it was good and could be used for recording video. This at a time when Sony-Ericsson had both Xenon and LED on a single phone. Even now when it launched the N86 8MP, it gave it dual LED flash and one does not need to state how poorly the LED compares to Xenon flash. Now Sony-Ericsson comes with a 12MP monster and guess what, it has Xenon flash!
Ovi:
At first I thought that Ovi was a great step forward, it still is, but somewhere down the road, Nokia has stopped listening to its users. Ovi being rolled out in parts around the world is absolutely nonsensical. Develop a service, launch it through out the world, it’s better like that and will definitely translate into more users for your service. Look at Google, they follow that principle and see how well GMail, Google Reader, etc are doing.
N-Gage V2.0:
What a great idea it was, but what went wrong? no game portability to other devices, no touchscreen based titles, no accelerometer based games? high prices, that’s a lot of things stopping the mass acceptance of N-Gage. Sure the high prices has been tackled a bit. N-Gage has an expanding line up of games and that’s a good thing, but will that be the only thing that will ensure it’s success?
Competition:
Now this is where Nokia hasn’t really paid too much attention. Samsung has quietly crept up Nokia’s back, they have better phones and features currently. Sony-Ericsson is going to release the Idou soon and would only complicate matters further for Nokia. So how did Nokia counter this? Nokia launched a 8MP phone which was supposed to be path breaking. the N97 is also there, but with a high price in today’s times, you would have to be joking about people buying the phone. Nokia had the N93i which flopped, that N93i a jewel inside it, optical zoom. Why not do some R&D and come out with a 5MP camera sensor, with 3x optical zoom, face recognition, more modes and better photo processing capabilities?
S60 Ambassadors:
S60 recently has announced the withdrawal of the Ambassadors initiative. Why? The one thing that differentiated S60 from the other OSes was an active Ambassador program. Without the S60 Ambassador, who is going to generate buzz for S60? This is what set the S60 platform apart from the others, now with this edge gone, S60 will become just ‘another’ OS. Pity, S60 Ambassador program could have made S60 even stronger.
With all of these things, the one thing that comes to my mind is, whether Nokia is really listening to people or just doing something it thinks is the right thing. if things continue like this, I personally would shift to a Samsung. I just don’t see what Nokia has which can keep me loyal towards them.
Wake up Nokia, if this continues, you won’t have a lot of loyal customers left. I’m already contemplating on buying a N97? 6 months ago, I absolutely wanted to buy it. That’s how much things have changed!