I was shopping around for a new mobile phone recently, as my trusty Nokia 8230 had finally died on me. (It was never the same after getting soaked at Songkran last year, the Thai New Year Festival cum three day waterfight. Should’ve followed the locals’ lead and put it in a condom for safekeeping. Anyway). After my two year stint at Vodafone where I saw more handsets than is healthy for you, I was surprised at how little phones have moved on since. When I left Vodafone, the first colour screen clamshell phones were arriving in the shops, like the Sharp GX10. There’s a lot more clamshells around now with more of the same – whizzier games, nicer cameras, better screens etc – but there’s not much seemingly pushing the phone envelope on the market at the moment.
The one phone that did get my attention was the Nokia 6260, which has a large clamshell design and comes with a wireless keyboard. For a couple of days this became an object of technolust. As someone who can type faster than he can write, and can’t read what he’s written anyway, the possibility of having a dinky foldaway wireless keyboard to use with a phone was deeply enticing. (The brick-like Communicator’s keyboard is too small for my chunky digits). When I was backpacking a couple of years ago, I kept my travel diary using an old Jordana PDA and fold-away keyboard combination – it worked perfectly for sitting at a table dashing off some notes. The wireless keyboard would make it even easier to use and looked slimmer and sleeker that what I was used to. But…one trawl around the CNet Asia reader reviews was enough to put me completely off the idea of even trying the Nokia 6260. According to a large proportion of the reviews, the build quality is awful, with buttons literally falling off and basic functionality (like, er, voice calls) not working correctly. Given that this is a top-end handset that costs £200 minimum without contract, it seems staggeringly stupid to release a premium product that hasn’t been thoroughly quality checked. Did no-one in the boardroom stand up and say “We’ve made a piece of shit”? Here’s a phone that I’d be prepared to pay out for precisely because of its advanced functionality (the keyboard) but don’t want to buy because they can’t even get the basics to work properly. I don’t mind paying, but only if I get a product that works. There must be some new business logic about releasing shoddy products and hoping they stick that I haven’t heard about – surely the damage to Nokia’s reputation and the grief they cause themselves with customer support, irate consumers etc, it would be just easier to wait another few months and ensure it actually works before shipping? Obviously not.
I know, I’m not saying anything new here. And that, in itself, is worrying, because aftersales customer service is still where so many companies completely fall down and we have no real recourse but to not buy their products. I wish there was more I could do than that, though. I wish I could tangibly register my irritation, like pressing a big red button on their website which sends an electric shock direct to the CEO’s central nervous system. OK, getting carried away now, but it’s frustrating when such basic competence is lacking from a market leader. Because for all the guff about consumer power etc, we are still reliant on companies producing decent products so the rest of us can get on with our own work. Bottom line: I’m without a shiny new toy which could have helped me increase my productivity and write even more asinine blog posts like this one.
In the end, I put aside my dreams of mobile keyboard fun and plumped for the cheapest Nokia I could find – the Nokia 1100, for just under 3000 Thai baht – about 45 quid without contract. (I’m a sucker for the Nokia user interface, easily the most intuitive of all the handsets I’ve used. I’m not sure if it’s true anymore, but back in my VF days a common statistic in circulation was that people sent twice as many text messages from Nokia handsets as they did from any other brand, simply because the interface was more usable). It does all those phone things, has a crucial Reminder function on it to prompt my increasingly goldfish-like memory into action, and it even comes with a natty built-in torch. I did temporarily yearn for a phone camera so I could post pictures direct to my travel blog scattered, but realised that might get very expensive, very fast. And anyway, a cheap phone is probably the best way to go, given that Songkran is about to happen again in the next couple of weeks and I’m inevitably going to get soaked several times over. Now, where did I put that condom?
More on Nokia 6260:
Google | Amazon UK | Amazon US | Wikipedia
