Anssi Vanjoki On The Nokia N97 Debacle

Nokia's are way better than the remaining crowd. It requires guts and a sincere effort to bring a drowning product back to life again. Nokia just did it with N97. I hope they follow the same with their flagship n900 too. I had always admired Nokia for not forcing the cruel locking mechanisms. They are also admired for adopting and contributing to open source projects/products. I wish them success in the coming days which are really challenging for them (MeeGo, Maemo 6, Symbian^3, Symbian^4). They are definitely not sitting idle.

For me, it all comes down to how many devices could I possibly own? I mean, I like shiny new toys, but come on. I cannot get more than one each year to keep up with technology, it would be a really bad financial decision.

That aside, I encourage people to wait for devices as long as they can. Especially if reviewers (just like Symbian-Guru.com) say it's a let-down (like you did). They will have their launch bugs fixed. Like I didn't do with my E72, got it as soon as it was out. Bad decision. Even now I'm waiting for that magical firmware that-will-fix-it-all (keyboard, RAM, Nokia Messaging and the rest). If I would have kept my beloved E71 for another 3-4 months, I wouldn't have had this problem,

If all reviews (that you trust) say it's a great experience and it's worth the money, then grab it. But for God's sake, don't pre-order the things. It's like buying an expensive car without a test drive. Would you do that? — valid for people not wanting devices and toys just to brag to friends, they have other issues, mostly personality and reproduction organs' size related.

ROFL at your last line.

Anssi can say all he wants but until Nokia gives its software QA teams the hammer, I won’t trust them. Too many of Nokia’s serious software defects get ignored for no good reason. Maybe they have a lack of communication because so many of their QA activities are outsourced.

For the groups that do deliver good phones, it’s not unusual for their reward to be a pink slip. Is the team that brought us the N86 still around?

I have been a Nokia fan for years and my experience with the N97 has been dreadful. However, I am not about to turn my back on a company I respect because of issues with one device. It happens to everyone. Just ask Toyota.

I am ditching my N97 though. I wish I never upgraded the firmware to v21 as I had no problems before. Since the upgrade I have had to do a hard reset 4 times and will be doing my 5th one tomorrow. The phone constantly turns itself off and/or gives me memory full errors (no widgets loaded on home screen, no third party themes and no “always on” apps loaded) even though it appears I have 50 – 60mb of RAM at any given time.

I am through with the device, but not Nokia. I will get a N97 mini while I await the first Symbian^3 devices. I was going to get a N900 but the MeeGo announcement made that phone obsolete in my opinion.

I bought the N97 the day it was released in Germany and i must say it is the most unused Nokia device i ever had. Their advertisements before the release were outstanding and even all those bloggers hyped the device. The build quality is poor for a 550 Euro gadget as well as the experience you get when switching it on. The N97 totally made Nokia a no-go for me. I may give them a chance again when Symbian ^4 is released (and with it handsets with the power they need in terms of processor and RAM) or the Maemo successor catches me.

If i could, i definitely would throw the N97 back to Nokia but that would give them another 550 Euro packed in cheap plastic from me.

I don't like also this quite known approach to release first -> fix it later… Microsoft have been doing this since the beginning and it is still there… But I sincerely didn't expect this to happen to Nokia as well. Of course, some small fixes in the 1st months are inevitable, but changes like functionality and usability during the 1st months are quite… not appreciated at all. We all know that Time-2-Market is important, but this can be also the details which can sink an unsinkable boat… With some millions you can take pictures of then sinked down in the ocean, but can you fix it and bring it back?
Well, as a Nokia follower I'm quite satisfied with the latest 2.x firmwares, but I will think three or four times before pre-ordering again… So, will Maemo be ready to hungry (and angry) customers?
I guess I can wait a little bit to see what will happen.

When you do your hard reset, do you also format the 32gb of internal storage? Not doing so can cause tons of issues.

I haven't before but will be this time as a last ditch effort. All my music is on there and I haven't wanted to try and reload it and back-ups havn't worked before because of issues with Nokia Music's DRM.

interesting. he admitted nokia's mistakes and shortcoming with this flagship device. but i hope they learned their lesson and make sure they give the owners of these devices symbian ^3 goodness.

What I would very much like to know about Symbian^3 is: If you buy a Symbian^3 handset when they're available, will you be able to later on upgrade to Symbian^4 without changing the device itself? For free?

That is, will Nokia provide functionality that Android, iPhone or Palm devices provide – new version of the OS (bar customized versions) you can upgrade to…

Otherwise I fear that S^3 is just a last ditch effort that will stay at the top of the game for less then a year and then?

Otherwise, good to see Nokia to own up to the screwup that N97 without a doubt was, I just hope that the bunch of money he mentioned was worth it in terms of lost future revenues from the disgruntled customers that jumped the ship after N97…

N97 mini here I come. I did the hard reset today and formatted the E: drive. It worked great for about 3 hours and then started all the issues all over again. I will say it worked fine until I installed Nokia's Sportstracker and Handy Taskman. It took forever for me to remove those two and now that I have I'm waiting to see if the issues arise again.

It's a pity all the sites(and you), forget to mention SymbianFrance, which also participated in the interview. They have only been cited by All about Symbian.

Thanks for pointing that out. I noticed there was someone in the background, but it wasn't mentioned in the video who it was – I've updated the post to reflect this, I certainly don't want to leave out our friends at SymbianFrance.com.

I preordered the n97 based on my experience with the n95. It *was* a total disaster, from execution of the preorders to release of a phone that clearly wasn't ready to be released. I am as disappointed in the n97 as I was impressed by the n95.

It has been much better since the firmware update to v21. although many have complained of problems with this update, to me it has been much more stable. But, even though the OS seems to be stabilizing, there are still hardware issues (the lens cover scratching the camera lens for example).

I have decided, because of this, to leave Nokia behind. Android, here I come! (As soon as I find a handset I'm comfortable is not being beta tested on the general public….)

thats really nice of you ricky to accept the mistake and fix it. thats why i love symbian-guru.

I know that forgetting is not voluntary, it's really a bad point for mobilereview to have forgotten them.

I bought my last Nokia, the 5800. For the first months it constantly failed to restart after being shut off for the night. I went through countless hard resets only to find the issue was either bad memory cards or bad memory card drivers in Symbian, or both. This is a common problem, but Nokia has done nothing to fix it. Nokia's desktop apps are piss-poor. They force constant updates on you, if you don't accept them, the version you already installed and are using just shuts down.

To this day, Nokia doesn't give you any way to back up your phone. Oh sure, they back up contacts and certain apps and settings with no rhyme or reason, but other apps and settings, and all memory card apps don't get backed up. Every hard reset means hours of painstaking reinstalling apps and adjusting options. This phone should never have been released. Although at its price point it has great features, it's an unreliable piece of garbage. Today my phone restarted in the middle of the day without warning, just as I ended a call.

When it works, it's very nice. But it just doesn't inspire trust.

I don't care how many features a phone has, if I can't trust it it's no better to me than Windows (which I also no longer use). I was considering buying an E72 but I read many reports of quality problems and the space bar bug. I couldn't take the chance on being ripped off again with an alpha test phone and endless firmware “upgrades” at my expense, especially since you have to debrand to get most updates.

I just bought a BlackBerry and I have no problems. It's beautifully built, has a simple design, but most of all it just works.

Goodbye Nokia, you are too big and too arrogant to need my business.

[...] go to Ricky Cadden at Symbian-Guru.com and his response to a comment I made on his article, “Anssi Vanjoki On The Nokia N97 Debacle“.  Ricky pointed out that since I had not formatted the mass storage drive I would run into [...]

I must confess that I am also disappointed by the N97. Although it is my first smartphone, I have spent too much time fixing and tuning the device in the last 3 months.

What it is still broken (IMHO) is to have only 30MB of RAM free, with no application open other than Home and the Menu. This makes Opera 10 complain on memory shortage every minute.

What I realy would like to read here, is a debate on Ovi suite versus Ovi.com, or a desktop mobile application versus a cloud mobile application.

For the time beeing, I opted to invest my spare time to explore Ovi.com. It looks promising to hold my sensitive data… With no Ovi on linux desktop, this is all I get.

Olivier

Nokia lost a customer. I will have to get 2 or 3 Apple smart phone that let me down as bad as the N97 did before I try another Nokia. Still, I will go Blackberry before I even try another Nokia.
In March 2011 my current contract expires and I will get another phone. Looks like that it’s gona be an IPhone 4.
Good bye Nokia and good luck, ’cause you gona need it.