Thursday, June 29, 2006

Major Malfunction


I got tired of my Palm playing up decided to move away from the platform as their quality control has gone out the window. I picked up a Nokia E61. Nokia have crafted together a nice looking no-nonsense Treo competitor and its priced competitively as well from what I see on the interweb.

In terms of product design Nokia have made a damn sexy piece of kit, most of the shell is metal (I am guessing aluminum or an alloy), with a nice big screen and the nicest responding keys that I have felt on a handheld device.

Where things start to go wrong is the software. The Nokia E61 cannot take much more than 1,000 contacts - that's right its a business phone and yet when I synched over 5,000 contacts into it I started to get memory full messages.

I spoke to Nokia support and they claim that its a firmware issue and they are working on writing an update but they don't know when it will be fixed. . In order to get the update I will need to have my phone reflashed at a Nokia Service Point.

I know its unbelievable, so I will run this past you again: the Nokia E61 has a known fault that will directly affect business users because it will not hold as many contacts as a chavtastic Palm Zire PDA. It has sailed into production and they are only now thinking about fixing it.

And in order to further inconvenience their long-suffering customer base the firmware update when it becomes available can only be installed at a Nokia Service Point, leaving the customer without their phone. Nice, this makes the device about as much use as a liberal arts intern in a PR agency.