TokenBird's Musings

I spent ages looking for a new phone. I had a faithful nokia e70 which did the job of being a phone and email device quite well. Battery life was decent and it would surf t’internet too. But it was a brick and a the camera was rubbish. So I decided I would change it for a new one.

I was torn between the N86 and the iphone. The iphone also had a rubbish camera so there would be little to gain. I also tried an LG phone with a touchscreen and found it such an annoying experience I wished to hurl it at the wall. Therefore I chose the N86…

First day of use didn’t go that well as the migration tool only works if you migrate from similar nokias so it seemed you couldn’t migrate data from an E series to an N series even though they both run symbian. Great. Luckily I just synced the old phone with isync then synced the new one with it too so all calendar and contacts were imported without problem. I spent a happy afternoon playing with all the settings on the  phone. It was ok for the first few days then it crashed randomly requiring the battery to be removed to reset the phone. I’ve updated firmware,restored to factory , restarted it regularly and still this phone is the most unreliable phone I have ever used!

The bugs found so far: random freezing, new message indicator light stops working then you need to reset the phone entirely, randomly picture messages don’t send and hang about in the outbox and usually hang the phone, photos aren’t saved into the gallery but are there when you check the filesytem. You can’t use card memory as it makes the phone throw a wobbly. You can’t plug it in to a laptop to charge it as it switches new messages to  phone memory from mass memory. Battery life is mad. One minute it has nearly full bars the next it is half power. Switching on and off loses several bars even though the battery usage must be minimal. Email program is abysmal. It hangs and locks and generally is barely fit to use.

Worst problem of all is the atrocious build quality. The charger connector is wobbly and the slider makes noises now and is loose. The slide out keypad also has the number keys slightly too high

It beats me how a company as large as Nokia can release a phone with beta quality software. I found all the problems within a few days of normal use. Why don’t their in house testers manage this??? I’m sure many nokia users would be happy to be lent a phone for a few weeks to iron out these issues if Nokia are unable or unwilling to pay people to actually test the phone. It must surely be more cost effective than releasing the product and receiving such negative publicity.

Networks are not innocent in this either. They will insist in beggaring about with the software and changing options. This practice should be stopped. The only difference between a sim free and networked phone should be the start up logo and connectivity settings. Leave the rest alone!

Yet another firmware release is imminent. Will it be third time lucky?