Gamaze

Since a couple of months, I’ve been excitingly waiting for the Nokia N97 I ordered in May to arrive in my mailbox. The other day, when I finally  got my hands on it my high expectations were brutally crushed. Frankly, I was depressed by the user experience. Since it officially made it to the stores, the new flagship device from Nokia has also been publicly bashed by reviewers across the world – and not completely without reason.

The few strong areas where the N97 still keeps itself above the surface are the excellent dual-flash 5 MP camera, the hardware build and the familiarity of the Symbian S60 to devoted S60 users. Looking back, it really is a huge improvement to previous Nokia high end phones, no doubt about it. Still, when compared to its real competitors such as the HTC Touch Pro 2 and Hero devices, the iPhone 3G S and the Palm Pre, the N97 is not able not keep up at all. The user experience is completely outdated already at launch and to me it is not at all acceptable for something coming from the leading mobile company in the world.

From a consumer experience point of view, the mobile device revolution was started by Apple in January 2007 when Steve announced the first generation of the iPhone. This changed the battlefield completely. To the consumers’ delight the bar for high end smart phones has since then been raised significantly. I’m guessing Nokia is more than aware of the needed requirements but somehow 2.5 years has not been enough to make a shift in focus and create a product that is really enjoyable to use by consumers.

Personally, I’ve been using Symbian S60 based phones since the beginning of its appearance in the market – way before the iPhone. This means that I can not in any way blame the crappy user experience on unfamiliarity with the Symbian OS. It was actually one of the best smart phone operating systems when initially released but since then the OS has stayed pretty much the same. I’m sure there has been tons of development work and dollars going into S60 since, but enough effort has obviously not been on enhancing the consumer experience. On the other hand, I’m sure Nokia will read the N97 appreciation with a magnifying glass and take the corrective actions, but I’m afraid the smart phone clock is ticking a little too fast for the mobile making Finns. It will really require a major change in Nokia’s current thinking to realize that geeky tech specs on paper are not the key consumer selling points going forward.

Anyway, to cut a long story short it only took me about 15 short minutes to make the decision to immediately return my new N97 and pre-order an HTC Hero instead, the latest addition to the Google Android family that has been getting a lot of very positive buzz in the press. I have a strong feeling even the almighty iPhone will have a hard time to keep up with the smooth and efficient user experience HTC has been able to create through their “Sense UI” – a integrated layer on top of the standard Android OS. Also, I really like the openness of Android compared to Apple’s smooth but restricted user interface.

I feel my switch from Nokia to HTC is really the end of my long ownership streak of Nokia phones – and I’m sure I’m not the only user out here with similar thoughts. I can only hope that Nokia is able to make a real comeback worth the ad…

Mattias Mobile HTC Hero, N97, Nokia, phone, user experience