no, really

I’m not one to grovel and beg, so I won’t do it now. But here’s what I’ve got to say, Nokia: get over yourself. Once upon a time, you were the belle of the ball. You had pretty gowns and a rockin… set of features. You did it snappily and cutely without looking like an anime-loving Japanese schoolgirl with her STD clinic on speed dial. You had grace and efficiency that is trademark of your get-the-job-done-with-few-words Scandinavian heritage.

But then you got a little narcissistic. You were lauded for wonderful ideas and innovative interface designs, and while you were bowing, the world kept going. RIM is eating your lunch with one of those giant silver serving sporks and a pair of wooden salad tongs. Motorola has the worst interface on the planet, but they slap a shiny skinny cover around it and blammo, you’ve got a household name. So, Nokia, where’d you go?

I know you’ve still got your foot in the game, but you’ve gotta keep going. The E61 was a great start… it’s just too bad that Cingular forces you to your knees until you come out with the E-series’ idiot cousin the E62. Yes, yes, I hear you… if you want to play ball in the US, you’ve gotta play by their rules. Isn’t it about time that changed?

Terminate your contracts with the providers and open a store next to every Starbucks in North America. See how they like it when people sign a contract to get the “free phone” and pop their SIM into one of your hot new toys.

Better yet, get people who actually use your phones to beta test them in the US. There is so much diversity of users in terms of habits and signal strength and travel, etc. in the US, that it’s a great edge-case market for testing. Anyone can prove that their phone works perfectly at 72F at sea level at 10:30am standing 100 feet from a tower that’s serving up all the network you could want. But what about those people in mountainous regions? And those of us whose municipalities would rather we stick to smoke signals than put up obscene towers just so we can find out what color socks Tawni is wearing to her soccer game while we drive down the road in our Escalade doing 90 mph.

Better yet, ask me! I’m a great tester. I use my phone daily for all sorts of tasks, and I never bang it on the desk to make it go faster. I travel from the suburbs to Manhattan routinely, by car or by train. I work with computers and the Internet ALL DAY, and have friends with all sorts of other devices and networks that I exchange txts, emails, mms, etc with. Besides, I’m sick of shelling out hundreds of bucks and signing contracts that describe the term in Epochs just to play with a piece of plastic that just makes a phone call.

You’ve (hopefully) already read my wishlist of features in a phone. How about you get to drawing, and give me a call when you come up with something. I’ll let you know if it’ll win hearts like Jennifer Garner, or just please loyal fans like Anne Hathaway. They both look good in a dress, but which do you want on your arm?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 27th, 2006 at 3:18 pm and is filed under toys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.