Nokia FAIL

I’ll start this post by pointing out that I am a Nokia fanboy. I love Nokia devices. I’ve only ever owned Nokia phones, and it is no secret how much I love my Nokia internet tablets.

But boy are Nokia frustrating.

I am currently awaiting my N900…still. I pre-ordered several weeks ago. Such is my geekiness and general devotion to Nokia devices that I’ve been following the progress of the N900 pretty much all year. And the red-hot second it got announced and was available for pre-order I did so.

Unfortunately this has exposed me to how poor Nokia’s logistics operation is. They make great devices, but they just don’t seem to have a clue when it comes to communicating with customers, or having a firm idea of their ability to deliver.

Originally it was widely expected the N900 would be available by October, in time for the Maemo developer conference. Now maybe Nokia never planned this to be the case, and maybe they had to change their plans. But it was not ready. Instead they gave the 300 attendees, pre-production models (just on loan though).

A few weeks later and it was expected that the N900 would be ready for late October. But eventually Nokia stated that they were taking feedback from the 300 developers and fixing important issues. I can accept that. Hell that’s even a *good* thing. It might have been nice if they had stated up front that this was the plan. But I’ll give them credit, and assume it was.

So they announced the device in late August. With nothing more than a very vague suggestion of when it would ship. And apparently no fixed plan.

This is pretty poor in itself, I appreciate their openness, and that many of their competitors would not even indicate a device existed until they knew exactly a ship date. However, I believe it’s possibly to be open, whilst still giving specific expectation of time frames. For example, give a date for a date, eg we will take a check point on ‘nth of October’ and at that point we will announce the ship date.

But no, just vagueness and handwaving. In early November (10th?) Nokia announced that they had started ’shipping’. This apparently meant units were leaving their factories, because it certainly didn’t seem to mean anyone, anywhere, was getting one.

The thing which started to annoy me was that, at no point, did I as a customer with a pre-order, have any e-mails sent to me to keep me informed. Everything I know was because I went looking on line for information.

A couple of weeks ago I e-mailed customer support to ask them what was happening. Nokia have announced they’re shipping…so where is my device?

The response I got, on the 12 of November, was that the ‘tentative’ date for delivery was the 19th

Great, but why tentative? That’s a really short window, and any logistics operation worth its salt should be working to a firm date on that scale. I’ve only just stated working on a project, and one of the first things I learned about it was the date we must be finished. Because the amount of time it takes to go through manufacturing, etc. is a known quantity, and the date that we will be ready is fixed. So my team has to tune content to fit in the time we have been given. That’s just good business.

So I guess it came as little surprise when the 19th arrived, and no word was received about my device being shipped. Though I was surprised that I didn’t get an update from Nokia.
But just to rub salt in the wounds, I did get an e-mail from Nokia, first thing on the 19th…’you contacted customer support last week, please fill in this survey’… So some part of the business is capable of realising I’ve interacted with Nokia, and automatically following up. Why can’t you apply that to – ‘Nokia told you your order would be with you by now, but we’re sorry to tell you that there has been a delay’?
I e-mailed them again, and on the 20th I got a response. Sorry, the delivery date is now ‘tentatively’ the 23rd.

I responded asking, what do you mean by ‘delivery date’ is that to me? Or to you, then you’ll ship them out?. After all, if on Friday the 20th, there is any chance in hell of you delivering to me on Monday the 23rd, then you know for sure, none of this ‘tentative’ nonsense.

They said delivery date, did mean delivered to me. But they couldn’t even tell me what had caused the shift in dates. Whoever is answering the e-mails simply hasn’t been told why the date is moving. Surely someone at Nokia knows? Surely someone, somewhere should have a pretty good idea exactly how long it takes to get physical units from a factory to distribution centres, from there to local warehouses, and finally into the hands of delivery companies. If this was my business, I’d expect to know from the moment the design for a device is final, from the moment I deliver the software. Exactly how long before they are ready to hand to a courier to fulfill an order.
Factories run at known speeds. Trucks run to schedules. Someone should know the date they can hit, with risks calculated for random out of control issues (driver strikes etc.)

But here I am on Sunday the 22nd, and I’ve had no e-mail to indicate shipment. My order status still simply says ‘this order has not shipped’ Maybe it will ship out on Monday, but Nokia customer services apparently have no clue. And they aren’t making any effort to keep me updated, if I want to know what’s going on I have to go ask nicely for an update.

Of course the reason all this is so frustrating, is that I do love these devices, I am sold, I was sold a year ago on the rumours alone. If I was less of a geek, less taken by the openness of Maemo, less of a Nokia fanboy, then I could just walk away, order myself something that is available right now, from a company that knows how to do customer service.

But I am a geek, and I won’t walk away. I’ll just sit and wait and endure the pain of interacting with a company that just doesn’t have a clue. Because I know ultimately what they lack in logistics capability, they make up for in an R&D department that churns out some fantastic devices. With an openness policy that puts everyone else to shame.

But Nokia, please, for your sake as much as mine, fire whoever is responsible for taking the output of your r&d, and putting it in the hands of paying customers. And get someone with a clue.
Nothing infuriates customers more than no information. You could have gone though the same set of steps, even the same set of date push-backs, with much less bad feeling, just by pro-actively informing me of what’s happening. Rather than making me chase to be told when I get to give you money.

But really, you should not have had to do any of that. Because you should have control of your distribution. If you have to give ‘tentative’ dates, then you are already expecting to fail.

My disturbing Nokia obsession

I just noticed this announcement : http://maemo.org/news/announcements/first_maemo_5_sdk_release_targeting_platform_developers/
Which is the first drop of the core OS that will run on Nokia’s next internet tablet.

I find that the extent to which I’m becoming a Nokia fan-boy getting worse as the years progress. In the beginning I just found they made the best quality mobile phones hands down.
I’ve owned at least 5 Nokia phones, the last two of which have been the e61 and the e71. Both of which are very good phones particularly for what I want. Oddly enough I still carry my e61 in my jacket to use on occasion, mainly to act as a wireless hotspot in emergency ‘no wifi’ situations.

But my love for Nokia products has grown to alarming proportions with their internet tablets.

First I bought a Nokia 770, to be fair I bought it quite long after its initial release. I was tipped off by a friend that somewhere was selling them for £75…I mean £75!! For a touch screen, wifi enabled computer-in-your-hand. I couldn’t say no.

The reviews of that device had not been great..too slow, not enough memory etc etc. And for their RRP those where valid concerns but for £75 none of that mattered. And for 12 months itg didn’t leave my side.

Then I decided it was time to justify an upgrade. Clearly this was a type of device that suited me well. I love the Linux core, the functionality, the community about it… so I got myself a Nokia 810 the top of the line. Like the 770 but better in every way.

In the last few months I’ve had the 810 beside me as my constant companion. I’m using it to write this post from bed. Whilst keeping up with twitter and e-mail and rss feeds etc. I also use it as a remote to my myth tv box with mythetomer.

However as with the 770 it’s not perfect and most of that is a desire for a little more power, mainly for slightly more powerful apps…I’d love to see navit running in 3d mode..(come to think of I’d love to see a navit update for 810 fullstop)

And with this first sign of maemo 5 I already know I will get the new one when it comes out. And the fact that they are releasing pre-alpha chunks for the community to review, and working with opensource is all key to my own worrying obsession with my internet tablet. Nokia must be doing something right, as here I sit just waiting to find out when I can lay my hands on one… I’m such a fan-boy perhaps I should actually look at what other products exist in this space..

New E71 and broadband dongle

Three gadgets in two weeks!
After some considerable time chewing over the various options for connectivity I had been failing to figure out the right combination of phone, tariff, signal at work & sensible fair use.
That was until a friend at work lent me his 3 broadband dongle. I’d seen these but not given much thought to how they work. What he showed me was that they have a sim inside. Importantly a sim which can just as easily go in a phone and provide a 3g connection to that.

So I tried it in my Nokia E61. And I found something else out…I get a signal at my desk, and at several key places at work (e.g. the coffee bar)

With the sim in my phone I can run JoikuSpot which uses the wifi to create an ad-hoc hotspot that uses the 3g connection to provide data access.

And with that I can connect anything, and importantly my N810. And even more importantly, do so anywhere I get a 3g signal.

The broadband dongle plans also start at 1G cap, and fair use is not restricted to basic browsing. After all they expect you to use it with a computer.

So I went to the 3 site…and then talked myself into looking at the E71… On a basic plan for £20 a month with no upfront cost. Plus the broadband dongle is then half price.

And that clinched it, so now I have a shiny new Nokia E71 and a 3G dongle I can use either directly with my laptop or put the sim in either of my E series phones.
So £25 a month is a little more that I initially wanted to spend. But I’ve got a combination that is right for me. When Nokia finally bring out the next internet tablet with 3g support, I can pop my sim in that…

Next thing is probably to buy JoikuSpot pro (I’ve been using the ‘lite’ edition to prove it works)

As for how awesome my new E71 is… I’ll write about it next week, after a full week of using it.

It’s time to try my new connections on a trip…off to Southampton I think.

My new Nokia N810

Yes! It finally arrived, last Monday I got my hands on my new N810.
There were a few tense moments, initially plugging it in it refused to turn on… I started to think my £160 bargain on e-bay might be an expensive hassle. However I decided to try one of my other chargers, and everything came to life! Oh the joy.
So it is just the charger with it is broken. It delivers enough charge for things to think they’re charging, but it never steps up to actually charge.
I suspect the seller may have thought the device itself was broken… Why do I think this uncharitable thing? Well when it booted up, all of their settings were still in place, e-mail, facebook, e-bay, etc., etc. Someone suggested I could have arranged to sell my old 770 back to them for more than I paid… tempting, but I figure I got what I want for a great price no matter what they thought.

So that was last Monday. And now I’ve had a few days to enjoy it.
It is fantastic, better than the 770 in every way I wanted. It’s faster, can handle multiple apps open much easier. It doesn’t stall when one app is busy.
The slide out thumb board is great. It takes some getting used to, but has allowed me to write this whilst waiting for Kat in various shops. And I’m now in the queue at Boswells

…And now I’m not…

Anyway, the camera, as you can see is not great. It’s a web cam rather than a camera for taking stills.

Although you can run Skype, they do not currently support video… but that’s OK because Gizmo does. Are you listening Skype?? But for video support I’d never even have looked at Gizmo. Now it’s installed on two machines, and i will set up my mum next time I visit…

The device comes with 2gig internal memory, in addition to 256mb flash. And space for an 8gig external mini SD.
In one week I’ve already cloned the OS from the flash to the 2G so that I have more application install space.
And I got an 8G card so I have plenty of storage.
The process of cloning was made fairly trivial by
penguinbait
My only issue was having to disable the extended swap settings and reboot before the install tools could do their thing.
This process kept all my apps and settings, but gives me loads more room to play with applications. Thanks penguinbait.

My one gripe is not being able to connect at work. But even that has a promising outlook.
Kalle Valo has announced an opensource wifi driver
Which will open up all the connectivity enjoyed by my laptop, so very happy about that.

Other nice things that I’ve found.
E-mail notification, it automatically checks for mail, even without the mail app running, and provides blinking notifications, but it does it nicely. It shows up the mail titles, and gives a way to open it or close the notification.

Bluetooth file transfer, having paired my mobile phone I found it showed up in file manager. From there i could navigate the phone’s filesystem, and stream the mp3’s from there straight to the audio player.

But mostly it’s speed make all things better, browsing is reasonable, youtube works, facebook works.
All the cool multimedia apps run at sensible speed.

If the rumours of a 3g capable variant turn to reality I may have to upgrade, but for now I’m one happy nokia fan-boy.

Why open platforms are great

About a year ago I bought a Nokia 770. It didn’t get great reviews when it first came out. But then it was expensive when it came out first. Last year they were selling cheap….*really* cheap, as the latest model had just come out. So I bought one, and I’ve written before about getting a Bluetooth keyboard for it, and writing on it at my local coffee shop. Which is where I am now.

Now it has its flaws, and it’s not the fastest thing in the world, however is it basically Linux based, and there is a lot of open development that happens. This week I discovered that it is possible to install a ‘hacker edition’ of the Maemo OS. The hacker edition basically allows you to install the latest OS from the N810 on the 770. It’s mainly aimed at developers, however whilst I was looking into it I also discovered a few other things you can do. Most importantly you can update the kernel to make its MMC card access faster, a lot faster. Basically the default supports older cards, and in so doing drops to the lowest common denominator. But if you have a newer card, you can get something like 4 times the read/write speed out of it.

These two factors combined with the ability to load the OS onto the card rather than flash mean that you can install OS2008, the update the memory card drievr, and have it all booting from the memory card. The theory is that this gives you much better performance.

I say ‘theory’ because I found various comments some saying it is much faster, others saying not so much, and still others saying that the 770 really isn’t up to running 2008.

Undeterred I followed a how to on the internettablettalk forums. At first I tried os2007, since there were some comments this might be better, and the how to claimed it should work just as well. However I couldn’t get it to work. The install of the basic 2007 worked fine, but I could not get the copy to memory card working. So I tried again with 2008 and that worked fine.

So I’ve been running it for the last week. And I can tell you that it is is much faster than the default OS. But only in some places… I can completely see why some say it’s no different, and others that it is worse. And it seems to come down to applications. Right now I’m using Maemo wordpy to author this blog post, and it is flying, I can type pretty quick and it is keeping up much better than the previous version on the default 2006 os. Plus the new version has some swanky new features, such as showing me word options as I type.

The basic OS is much faster, browsing is pretty good, but some pages can still cause it problems. The audio player is better, though not much faster. Most of the audio type apps I’ve tried are quite slow. One looks great, scanned my NFS mounts for music no problem. But as soon as you start to play something, the interface becomes almost completely unresponsive. I guess if you’re queuing an album, letting it play through before queuing the next this isn’t too big of a deal. However I think it’s these apps that make people think it’s much slower.

Other problems are that some apps, particularly sound and video apps are reliant on the hardware underneath. Which is different in the 770 from the 810 that 2008 OS is really for. As such getting Mplayer installed was a little more complicated than just an install from the repository. I found someone with a version compiled specifically for the 770 running 2008 and I had to go into ‘red pill’ mode to get it to install.

Briefly, red pill mode is a wonderful built in thing, that it seems turns off certain checks, or relaxes certain rules that allow you to do things that would otherwise not work. It is a dangerous mode, since it would appear it requires you to be sure that this thing will work, even though it doesn’t agree… But I love how you switch it on…. You go into the application installer, go to edit the repositories, and create a ‘new’ one. But all you do is replace the URL with the word ‘matrix’ and then CANCEL the dialog. This brings up a dialog prompting you to chose a pill, red or blue. Red to go into red pill mode, then go back and select blue when you’re done to return to normal. (I always thought there was no going back)

OK so having got Mplayer installed, that seems to work better than ever to, since the kernel I now have installed has been tuned to allow certain Mplayer specific things to work better on this hardware.

And this is why open platforms rock, I bought for cheap, a device that was already ‘old’ a year ago. And now 1 year on, it just got (in my view) better than ever. Because some great people work to improve the open platform they started with.

It’s still a little buggy, the hardware is still underpowered for certain things. But the 2008 OS has some nice features (Bluetooth keyboard support built in for one). I’ve not finished getting to grips with it all yet. And some apps really don’t work well, because they were written for an 810 and really do need that extra bit of power/memory.
But for everything I had at the 770’s default 2006 install, it’s all better and faster than before.

And you know what, it actually makes me seriously consider updating to the 810 just because I’d get a bit more power, and the comfort of knowing that it too will benefit from the support of a great community in the years to come that will make it better as well.

Now if only someone would fix EAP-TLS so I could connect properly at work…..