Back when mobile phones were all about hardware, radio technology, silicon chips and plastic casing design, Nokia kicked everyone’s ass and it was a proud time to be a Finn (also a Nokia employee for a while). That time period was around one decade ago. I guess you could compare it to the 80’s when personal computers were still a messy playground with tens of competing manufacturers pushing their hardware+software packages to consumers, and Commodore building a comfortable lead with their C64 killer product. We all know where Commodore is today, or more specifically, most of us have absolutely no idea of where they are. Since those early days we’ve moved on quite a bit and everyone’s using either Windows or Linux on very generic hardware (apart from the crowd who choose to pay for the Apple/OSX device lock-in). That, in my opinion, is where we have been moving towards im the mobile phone markets ever since 2007 and the release of the iPhone. Nowadays we carry just big screens with us, either with or without a slider qwerty keyboard, and that’s pretty much how exciting the hardware part gets. Take a look at the HTC product catalog if you don’t believe me.

How is Nokia doing in this brave new mobile world? Not too well. Sure, they’ve got as many devices on their product catalog as ever and they completely own the non-smartphone market in developing countries. But do they really live up to the promises of their product marketing department or, more importantly, the expectations of their most loyal customers, their advocates? Well, you be the judge. Here’s one example of how a N97 customer felt after his purchase:

Now here’s the piece of news that originally inspired my own blog post: Symbian-Guru.com is over. I strongly encourage you to read through what Ricky and Rita have written down as the epitaph of their site, as this reads much like an epitaph of Nokia and Symbian that wouldn’t of course be published like this. Some key points from their writing could be summarized as follows:

• The gap between promises/expectations and product reality has grown unacceptable
• Developers have abandoned the Nokia platform long ago and now all hope lies on Nokia’s internal software development efforts
• Nokia’s own services are all hype and no content, as not even the company’s employees are committed to using them
• “Open source” in the context of Symbian is a meaningless buzzword, when no one is interested in the source in the first place
• Waving the Nokia/Symbian flag has become too embarrassing in the US market due to lack of visible marketing support from Nokia

As a sort of a CRM practioneer with some little insight on what customer relationships mean to a company, I would now like to produce the following quote from my very own words:

When you betray your most loyal customers and they call it a day, the game is over.

The emotions described in the Symbian-Guru.com post are the cornerstones of a successful company, except that now the stones have been turned and there is nothing to build on anymore. It is no longer a case of doing minor adjustments to product offering or shifting the focus of marking communication – we’re far beyond that by now. Of course the biggest mobile device manufacturer in the world could never publicly admit such a deep crisis, but the most important customers know it already. From observing the market reactions of the early adopter crowd, everyone who is seriously looking for proper smartphone functionality from the handset that they carry around with themselves is going either for iPhone or Android. It’s hardly a secret to anyone, rather it’s plain and obvious. That’s what I’ve done and I’m sure many others will follow.

There will certainly be a big enough market outside the world of smartphones and “smart” (geek) users to ensure that Nokia can keep generating billions of € worth of sales, which the stock market analysts can delve into and speculate future revenue trends by analysing how much more the company can squeeze out of it’s superior supply chain. However, it will not be the market that will attract the interest of those people who are building the new application ecosystems on top of the device manufacturer’s offering. They will be following the iPhone crowd, where all the action is. Where new markets emerge.

If the old world of mobile phones was all about radio technology and hardware manufacturing, then the new world of mobile devices is focused around the services enabled by the hardware. This is of course not a surprise for Nokia, who have been continuously declaring their internal transformation to a service oriented company. Nokia have been making bold moves on the services front, by offering free navigation (after acquiring Navteq for $ 8 billion) and low cost packages for Comes With Music subscriptions to a semi-endless music catalog (something Spotify currently charges € 10 / month for mobile users) on their mid category products. Sure, these offerings do have lots of potential value to the customer, but upon a closer look they don’t necessarily have anything to do with the ability of building attractive mobile solutions that the users would like to use (as many Ovi users would probably agree). It is just built on external content, which Nokia is presumably using as a heavy loss leader product to get people hooked on buying the familiar hardware that the company actually physically develops and manufacures. There is basically nothing in this strategy that Microsoft, Google or Apple could not imitate if they wanted to. The difference is that neither Apple nor Google need to imitate it due to the success of their own unique strategies, and Microsoft can afford not to compete immediately but can rather attack a maturing market later on, since that is where they’ve always excelled at (and Windows Phone 7 looks to support this strategy).

Was N95 perhaps the last real flagship from Nokia? While there were many people willing to use it as the yardstick to play down the signifigance of Apple’s first iPhone offering, I think the underlying problems in the Nokia/Symbian camp were already building up at that time, regardless of the fact that N95 was a commercial success. A high number of complaints on software bugs and general lack of the kind of high-end feel expected from a flagship product could retrospectively be interpreted as signals that Nokia’s existing method of developing new high-end products was reaching the end of its lifecycle; a point where optimising the existing process no longer delivers significant improvements, but where you need to invent a whole new process instead.

How far do you then have to go to find a big flagship product from Nokia’s product catalog? Something that packed a true punch, like the iPhone did? Nokia 7650 from 2002 perhaps? The setting is of course completely different from Apple, who entered a new market, but the question still has to be valid. If you only deliver lots of good products but no single great one, then why should I buy from you? The picture below is a beautiful collage from the Nokia product catalog, featuring each and every mobile phone they have ever made between the years of 1982 and 2006. The number of new product innovations and dominant mobile phones of their time included in this serving is just awesome. The only problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a system in place that would keep producing the same kind of “wow” results in the new world we are living. Nokia has become a victim of its past success.

Acknowledging that all the market share you’ve achieved and the great products you’ve delivered over the years is now worthless might surely feel like an act of pure insanity at first. But if you could get yourself to admit it, wouldn’t that be the exact moment when the climb back up starts? If the game is over, just reboot (heck, remove the battery if you must) and start all over. If you can’t do that, then you might as well consider it the end of your world. We don’t need an N8 from Nokia, or Symbian^4, or statements from Anssi Vanjoki about the company’s passion to reclaim smartphone leadership – we need a hard reset, and we need it yesterday.

Anyway, the packaged arrived to the local post office, I went to pick it up and started examining the contents at home. Alongside the new modem there were a couple of campaign flyers. Here’s the first one:

“The package does not contain the cable required for connecting the modem to the antenna network, nor the Y plug splitter for your TV. Please re-use the components from your old modem.”

Ok, makes perfect sense, I’m all for reducign the environment footprint of my various gadgets. Then there was the second flyer promoting another campaign:

“Recycle your old modem to your friend, ask him to plug it in and order a 10M subscription at welho.fi/ekoteko. You will both get free months as a reward.”

Well, that’s another nice idea for a “save the environment” themed campaign. Of course the only problem here is that my friend would not have the necessary cables for plugging in the modem, since you didn’t send me any. So he would have to jump in his car, drive to your store in downtown Helsinki and pick up the parts from there.

With the explosion of sites and services where many of us register with our real name and create a real profile, the number of potential hits to be found is growing. This makes it all more interesting to see how Google ranks different sites that publish your name, because they are very likely to be not something you would have expected. Anyway, that’s just a side track of the topic I’m trying to get at, so let’s see what the results for a search on Jukka Niiranen looked like today on Google.com:

The first hit goes to a namesake of mine. Nothing unexpected there, as there’s plenty of us. My personal domain niiranen.eu comes in on places 3 and 4, after that we move to the usual LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. But wait: what the —- is Bantam Live, and why does Google think it’s the second most likely page that a person would be looking for when searching my name?

Ok, here’s the story. Bantam Live is a hosted CRM service, which is nothing like the traditional Enterprise Software that CRM used to be like in the 90’s and early 00’s. It’s in fact more like the social network services that people like you and me are actively using when not in the office. I tried the service, loved the concept and decided to show some respect by writing a tweet about it.

So what, there’s a million tweets every minute, right? Well, it just so happens that smart companies nowadays are listening to the conversation that takes place in Twitter. So was John Rourke, the CEO of Bantam Networks. Not only did he retweet it, but the company decided to quote the tweet on their own site’s front page. Nothing much I can or should do about that, since it’s a piece of text I have intentionally broadcasted to the world to see.

The end result is that now Google thinks I have something to do with the service. But is that actually such a big mistake at all? Isn’t it rather a lucky shot that the search engine has managed to surface such a connection, instead of blindly following hyperlinks and counting words? Sure, there’s absolutely nothing dynamic about the tweet text ending up on the page in this case, but it gives a glimpse of what could be possible with the data that’s already out there in the social network sites. Without having to build a proper semantic web to replace the web we have right now, the mere association of Twitter identities to people and companies could already have a huge impact on how the search engines might begin to understand the online content in a whole new way.

The real revolution of course is already taking place. Whether you call it Social CRM or something else, the fact that the customers now have a voice to speak with is creating a big demand for solutions and strategies that allow the companies to listen to the conversation that is taking place out there, and most importantly to be able to react to it. It might be a topic that I should rather write about in my CRM blog, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to draw the line between fun web apps and serious business platforms. Which is exactly the whole point of the revolution.

I felt like such a stalker, but was I really stalking on the poor guy? That is a question I was left pondering as we parted our ways and I moved on to the next list of tweets. Unlike in Facebook and some other networks that are repeatedly making headlines for alleged privacy violations, Twitter truly represents the raw power of untamed social networking applications. There is no privacy, period. The name of the game is in the public broadcasting of your thoughts to an unspecified audience. You don’t need to worry about the concept of a “friend”, as there are no friends in Twitter. You can of course follow other users, but this doesn’t have any impact on what they can see and know about you. It’s all out there and that’s why we love it. That’s what makes it the ultimate sharing platform.

Let’s take a look into the future for a minute. Layar is a great mobile app for demonstarting the concept of augmented reality. How it works is you launch the AR browser in your mobile phone, point the camera to any direction and Layar will start to append the image with location based information. The usual stuff like restaurants and points of interest are of course available, but you can also view things like geotagged tweets. With the kind of devices we are carrying around in our pockets, it is not at all far fetched to envision a time when you can pull up an augmented reality browser that shows you not just the buildings around you but the names of the people. Think of avatars and @username’s floating on top of the commuters in the traffic jams. The ultimate nude scanner for your mobile?

In the tech or media industry, or any knowledge work intensive line of business, it can no longer be considered bizarre behaviour to be constantly revealing yourself to the world through various social media sites and services. It is rather becoming the norm of what is expected. You better be active on Twitter and Foursquare, otherwise there’s a risk of people thinking you don’t “get it”. Ok, I’m perfectly fine with that trend, with my active sign-up policy to new and exciting web apps.

It is only when the virtual world meets the physical world that things can start to feel ackward. When you meet a familiar avatar in flesh and blood, there cab be a sudden sensation of “OMG, I know too much about you, yet you don’t know anything about me”. The unilateral nature of the relationship can play tricks with your head. People you’ve never met but who you’ve followed through Twitter can start to feel like pseudo celebrities, even though they are likely to be far more average Joe’s in reality than you are, with nothing better to do than posting stuff online 24/7.

I think we’re reaching the uncanny valley of social networks. This concept was originally introduced for describing how in the field of robotics there is a point in which the machines can begin to look too human, thus causing a natural feeling of revulsion in us human beings. In the world of social networks, this same sensation may be achieved by simply knowing too much about the stranger standing next to you. Something that is perfectly cool when sitting in front of your monitor at home can suddenly feel just plain “wrong” when meeting face-to-face. Sharing your life and thoughts is great, but just don’t do it when I’m around. God, us human beings can be such weird creatures at times.

Is there going to be a moment when we simply get enough of revealing ourselves to others? Will the new sociality trend reach its peak and make way for the ultimate privacy backlash, where people simply refuse to give out any personal details to any online service? I’d say that’s an unlikely scenario. Certainly we’ll need to go through the emotions and find the right balance, time and time again, but eventually we’ll have to make it across the valley. With social media and robots alike.

(After a continuing disappointment with YouTube’s support for RSS feeds, I also decided to take a look at alternative service providers and went with Vimeo.)

I could have flown home earlier, but I had previously reserved a ticket to Microsoft Convergence 2010 conference in Atlanta, US (you can read more about it in my CRM blog, part1 and part2) that was scheduled to start on April 24th. Since it began to look obvious quite soon that the flights in Europe would be affected for several days, I decided to re-route myself directly from Malaysia to US, without visiting home base. So, as a result, I performed my first ever around the world trip in quite a spontaneous manner.

Me and my colleague were of course lucky to be stuck in such a nice location as Kuala Lumpur. Furthermore, we were able to easily extend our stay in the same Sunway Pyramid Tower Hotel, thus removing the need to spend our time searching for alternative accommodation. On the night of our planned return date, Friday 16th, Malaysia Airlines still insisted on the web at 20:00 that their 23:55 flight to Amsterdam would depart as scheduled. Having viewed all the news online and putting 2 + 2 together, we decided to keep our heads cool and our luggage unpacked, since going to KL International Airport would have not served any purpose. At midnight the flight was cancelled and the world slowly started to come into terms with the true level of impact to the European air traffic from the looming volcanic ash high up in the clouds.

Even though Malaysia Airlines only has a few flights to Europe, their customer service phone number was totally unreachable on the next morning. Therefore we decided to take a taxi from Petaling Jaya to the MAS office in KL Sentral and visit a physical service desk, where we were given new tickets for the same flight on Sunday. Still, we didn’t really get our hopes high, because it was quite clear that in a situation such as this no one could truly know what was going to happen, not the airlines nor the passengers. It was a true force majeure if I’ve ever seen one.

If the same event had occurred in 1995, I have no doubt that we would have been royally screwed, totally at the mercy of travel agency service representatives acting based on the official but false information given to them by someone higher up in the chain. Luckily we lived in the year 2010 and in a world full of online information sources and social media channels. I quickly became virtual best friends with @eurocontrol, the Twitter account of the European organisation for the safety of air navigation. They provided real time links to press conference events and materials through their tweets, thus giving the most cutting edge information available to any media, as Eurocontrol effectively made the decisions who could fly and where.

What I was doing for the four extra days while being stuck in KL was effectively running a virtual situation room on my laptop screen, collecting pieces of information like airport departure/arrival data, news bulletins from officials, weather forecasts, interviews etc. in order to formulate a best guess scenario of what was going to happen within the next hours and days. It was a true case of the wisdom of crowds in action, similar to the phenomenon we’ve seen during many of the natural disasters in the 21st century, where the best and most reliable information does not come from any single media giant but rather from leveraging all the small content streams out there. When it came to extending our hotel room reservations, at one point I realized that I didn’t really need to necessarily even have a room for me and my stuff for the day, but what I could not survive without was a reliable internet connection. Although €14 per 24h was a steep connection rate compared to the €80 per night for a four star hotel room, it was a price I was more than happy to pay (and charge to my employer later on of course).

On Sunday afternoon it had become quite clear that if I wanted to make it to the US in six days, flying through Europe was out of the question. I started to look for alternative connections which would take me there through the other side of the globe. I found a route that would fly me from KL to Atlanta through Tokyo in 32 hours and decided that it was the best deal I was going to find in the current situation. Thanks to the magical power of the internet, booking the flights, hotels and rental cars on the fly was not too difficult. Figuring out exactly what kind of data the US immigration officials wanted to have of my trip in how many systems and by what date was actually a much bigger task. Not surprisingly, our corporate travel agency Kaleva Travel was swamped with 1000 times more service requests than usual. Combining that with the fact that it was the weekend, self service was the only way to go. At the end, the only thing I really needed the agency for was to push the button on writing the final ticket for my US-FIN return flight reservation, as I didn’t want to board the plane without a printed return ticket. Printing documents (such as boarding passes) while on the road – yeah, that’s another one of those small but pesky hurdles of travel, still in the year 2010.

On Tuesday night at 22:00 I started my journey from KLIA to Narita airport in Tokyo, where I landed 07:00 local time. It was a whopping 8 hours stop before the next departure, which would have given me plenty of time to visit downtown Tokyo. However, I was wearing just a short sleeve shirt and the weather outside was +12C and raining, so I decided to stay at Narita and instead took a day room for a couple of hours to catch some sleep. Besides, I had done a one day tour around Tokyo last year, so “been there, done that” I thought. Boarding the Delta jumbo at 15:00 in Tokyo and stepping out of it at 15:00 in Atlanta on the same exact day was quite a strange feeling, but at that point I was already detached from all of the time zones in the world. I barely managed to climb into my rental Chevy HHR and navigate my way along Interstate 75 (a whopping 15 lanes at the biggest interchange!) to my final destination, Residence Inn in Kennesaw. From the moment of waking up in the hotel bed in Kuala Lumpur and falling asleep at the next one in Georgia, US, the 50+ hours in between definitely felt like one of the longest days in my whole life.

The stay around the Atlanta metropolitan area was a pleasant one. Not that I had much free time on my schedule, between moving from our Kennesaw office to downtown Atlanta for the conference and then back again. The weather was surprisingly cold and did not really fit well with my wardrobe geared for a stay in Malaysia. Even the rain in Atlanta was much harder than what they have in Southeast Asia, thanks to a tornado that passed through Georgia during the weekend I was staying there. I tried to avoid eating too many supersize meals, but I have to say the burgers they have on offer in the States make it a difficult task. Cruising around the suburb area in my Ford Mustang, grabbing a McMuffin to go and shopping at Walmart gave at least some taste of the local lifestyle. My return flight to Finland was through New York, and with 5 hours to spend at JFK, I decided to also make a very quick trip to Manhattan: train to Penn station, a walk around Madison Square Garden, burger meal on 9th Avenue, a couple of photos of the Empire State Building and then back to Helsinki to celebrate 1st of May. Finally!

All in all, I’m glad to have made the trip around the world, but I’m just hoping that next time I will have the chance to focus a bit more on enjoying the trip itself and not so much on the arrangements of it.

Now you have the chance to take a trip down memory lane and revisit the Internet from the 90’s, courtesy of the Geocities-izer by Wonder-Tonic. For example, you can remove all the Web 2.0 nonsense from this blog of mine by viewing it through Geocities-izer instead:

Ah, the good old times. More great examples available here.

1997: Nokia 2110

The most lengendary mobile device of them all. Bought it when going to the army for one year and it happily survived even the worst conditions in the cold and wet forest camps. Later on I gave it to my mom, fitted with a brand new red colour cover and it again duly served as the first mobile phone for a new user. If you only need your mobile for phone calls and SMS’s, then this baby pretty much had it all already in 1995. Why didn’t we just stop right here?

1999: Ericsson GH-688

Even though the battle between Finns (Nokia) and Swedes (Ericsson) was fierce in mobile phone manufacturing back in the 90’s, I still had enough courage to take a step to the dark side and replace my trusty Nokia with a more compact device from Ericsson. In addition to the smaller size, it had support for dual-band GSM and, most importantly, custom ringtones! No, not the ones you would purchase online and get delivered through SMS. I’m talking about the possibility of composing your own ringtones by entering the notes of the tune into the phone with the keypad. Yes, you bet this was a painful experience, but boy was I proud to have my phone ringing in a public place and have the riff from Café Del Mar by Energy 52 played by the monotonic beeper of the GH-688.

2000: Nokia 3210

The new millenium had dawned and it had started to look more and more obvious that Nokia was pulling away from the competition. Sleek and simple phones like the 3210 had pretty much perfected the usability and user experience that was to be expected from a traditional GSM phone, plus they were being offered to the mass market with highly attractive price tags. The external antenna had already been eliminated, making 3210 a real easy object to just slip into your pocket, while T9 made writing SMS’s a joy for sore thumbs.

2001: Nokia 7110

Behold, the mobile interet was here! Well, not quite in the way that you would interpret the term nowadays. The first WAP phone from Nokia did its best to open a tiny little window into the world of online content, but with the lack of useful WAP content or even GPRS rate data transfer, it was always going to be a tough sell. Luckily the 7110 had other nice features to make up for the dissapointment of WAP. Similar to the “banana” phone 8110, there was a spring-loaded sliding cover for the keyboard, which made answering to an incoming phone call great fun by allowing you to “pull the trigger” and watch the slider unfold. Another cool innovation was the roller wheel, which had replaced the up/down buttons. Can’t imagine why it wasn’t adopted to more models, but it sure made playing the built-in table tennis game a real mobile gaming treat á la early 00’s.

2003: Sony Ericsson T300

Monochrome is no longer enough, now it’s all about colour displays. Sadly the Nokia 3510i misses its availability target and I have to go for a model from the Ericsson camp, nowadays already a joint venture with the Japanese after a steep decline of market share. There’s one more gimmick to the T300 that makes it stand out from the competition: a camera. Yes, in the year 2010 you can hardly imagine a handset without some form of camera for capturing a blurry image of the priceless moment that sneaks up on you while your EOS 5D is in your other bag. Back in 2003 it was still all about capturing pictures for sending them through MMS messages (before we had Facebook), thus creating a demand for the huge 65k colour screens found in the high-end models. SE T300 was not an expensive phone, yet it came equipped with a VGA camera. So what’s the catch? Well, it came with a camera, meaning this was an external unit that you had to attach to the bottom of the phone. Oh dear…

2004: Nokia N-Gage

After colour displays and detachable cameras, things just kept on getting more obscure. Although only a brief encounter, I’m proud to say that Nokia N-Gage was my first smartphone. Yes, the machine was aimed to be a full-blown games console, but what it actually turned out to be eventually was a very affordable entry level version of a Symbian Series 60 phone, thanks to the massive flop of the mid-00’s mobile gaming concept and the steep discounts applied to the remaining units. If it wasn’t for the incomprehensible product design known as sidetalkin’, this phone could have proved to be a great vehicle for delivering mobile apps to the masses. But it wasn’t, and N-Gage was written off as Nokia’s first major failure in trying to extend its dominance beyond “just mobile phones”.

2005: Nokia 6670

Unlike you might think today, Symbian wasn’t always the ugly, older cousin of the iPhone OS. In fact, it used to be the coolest kid on the block, showing you the way how mobile phones would eventually grow up to be the platforms for social network extension that they are today. The 6670 was a more modestly clothed variant of the design-ish 7610, aimed at the business productivity oriented crowd. What it ended up being in my daily use was a hugely captivating toy for a 5-year old boy, who just couldn’t get enough of all the great action games I purchased from the appstores of mid 00’s. Ok, so maybe I did occasionally enjoy a few rounds of the shoot’em up’s myself. After all, how many impressive productivity apps were there back in 2005 anyway?

2006: Nokia 9310

Communicators have always meant Business with a capital B. Ever since the first 9000 model released in 1996, owning a black brick with a QWERTY keyboard and a GSM chip meant you were someone significant (in Finland, that is). By the time of the 4th generation of Communicators, Nokia had decided to release two alternative versions of the product: the real man’s heavy duty Nokia 9500 Communicator and the slimmed down ladies version Nokia 9300 (not even labelled as Communicator anymore). Despite of the obviously sexist product positioning, I ended up taking the slim route and learning to type with the compact N9310 keyboard. I must say the form factor in this smartphone was spot on, allowing it to easily fit in your pocket while still catering to the most hardcore PDA style note takers and PIM’ers. An important milestone was also the fact that this was the very first phone that provided me push email from the Exchange server back at the office, thanks to the Seven/SmartMail service I purchased for the whole office. Say goodbye to lazy evenings with no connection to your work commitments and deadlines filling up your inbox all day round (*sigh*).

2007: HTC S710

“What’s that phone you’re carrying around? H T what??? Some new model from Nokia?” Previously known as Qtek, it’s been a long road for HTC to become a mobile phone brand recognized by the masses, and I think there’s still some miles to travel. In 2007 their offering was firmly built around the ever powerful Windows Mobile platform, which had shown it’s strength in battling with Palm for the touch screen PDA market. The S710 however was a traditional phone with no screen to tap, which meant that the biggest strength lied in the highly compact but surprisingly usable slider QWERTY. Once again a perfect device for the occasional email replies, but lacking a decent browser (Opera Mini couldn’t quite make up for the sorry excuse that WinMo IE is to mobile browsing) and 3G connectivity meant it was not going to reach a classic status. A solid tool but nothing more.

2009: HTC Touch Pro2

Still standing on the Windows Mobile soil, but this time with a whole new bag of tricks. Looking almost like an iPhone with a QWERTY, this baby was clearly trying to reach across the age old divide between business and pleasure in mobile device target groups. The results were quite impressive in many ways, with the Youtube player pumping out tracks through the conference speaker and a WVGA display, while Opera Mobile rendered almost any website into an accessible format on a device that fits your pocket. The only major gripe with Touch Pro2 really was the operating system it’s built on. No matter how you mask the default UI with TouchFlo, there will still be plenty of traditional WinMo menus that are simply not meant to be operated with your finger but a stylus. So close, but no cigar.

2010: Samsung Galaxy Spica

Hello Android, hello Google. Our journey has just begun, so I’ll refrain from making any statements yet. Let’s at least wait until I manage to install that Android 2.1 firmware update (if Samsung ever sort out their issues with the sad New PC Suite and Kies applications, that is).