Skip to content

This is how the world will end for Nokia

If you’ve read my previous blog post about my personal handset history, you will have noticed that I have owned quite a few Nokia mobile phones in the past. You may also notice that the last one was from 2006. Not that it’s been a purely conscious decision to avoid Nokia for the past years, rather my current employer has been biased towards HTC and Windows Mobile (lately they’ve also given up on WM6, but that’s another story). My first mobile device that I paid with my own hard earned cash since the 2005 purchase of Nokia 6670 w/ Symbian S60 was a Samsung Galaxy Spica with Google’s Android OS. Did I consider buying a Nokia? Quite honestly, no, and I don’t think I would in the near future, as I’ve grown to be more and more pessimistic about the chances of the Finnish mobile giant being able to reclaim the leader position it once had.

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: Continued…

Posted in Tech.

Tagged with , , .

3 comments

By Jukka – July 10, 2010

Tune of the week: Tinchy Stryder – In My System

Tinchy was massive with his second album in 2009 and it looks like he’ll be challenging for a Number 1 again this year with the offerings from Third Strike, to be released in August. Here’s the first single.

Posted in Music.

Tagged with , .

No comments

By Jukka – July 6, 2010

Too much recycling (and why campaign planning matters)

My ISP Welho, a Finnish cable TV company that was recently sold to another operator called DNA, finally sent me the new 40M cable modem I had already ordered six weeks ago. It’s not the speed I was really after, since my previous 10M internet connection was fast enough for anything I would need. It was the price reduction in the monthly fee that you get by upgrading your modem, from €44.90 to € 35.90. Sounds like a sweet deal, even with the 6 month contract period.

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.

Posted in Tech.

Tagged with , , .

No comments

By Jukka – June 6, 2010

Indexing the dialogue

Let’s be honest here: everyone of us has Googled themselves. If you are reading this blog, meaning you have basic the Internet skills of surfing beyond the big brand media sites, then you’ll surely have noticed that the web is actually made of people, not computers. Being one of them entitles you to reflect yourself on a mirror, which in the virtual world means basically punching in your name to the search box and hitting enter.

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:

Google search for Jukka NiiranenThe 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?

Continued…

Posted in Web.

Tagged with , , , , .

No comments

By Jukka – June 5, 2010