Nokia, no more!


Well, when I bought my first Nokia 2300 phone in 2006, I never thought I would be writing a post of this nature about Nokia. Then, I was excited to have one of the first phones with radio and polyphonic ring tones in Indian market. 'Snake' was THE game then and the phone used to grab eyeballs too!

Nokia 2300
(Image source: Extra GSM )

But most of all,  2300 was durable to an extent I can describe only by the end of this post. I enjoyed music, played games and used it for the primary purposes of calling and texting over the years. The only prominent replacement/repair was that I changed the battery after 2 years of my use and yes, it came to me as a used phone in 2006.

A satisfied customer, becomes a repeat buyer and hence a core customer of the company, says marketing gurus. Hence, when I had enough of disposable income to turn a small dream in to reality, I bought a Nokia N70 in 2007. I paid around 13500 INR (about 240 USD) for the N70 compared to the 2000 INR that I spent on 2300. And boy, was it worth each penny?

It was; It was my music player/camera/browser/phone/organizer and what not! I used it without any problem till the end of 2010 and handed it over to my brother. Random fact, I never sold any of my phones yet, it stays in the family. I must mention that the phone has survived enormous number of falls of various intensities over three years. Currently my brother is using it for one of the best in class mobile cameras (not a Carl Zeiss but it was almost perfect!) and the N70 music version was a bliss for music lovers like me.

Nokia N70
(Image source: Wikipedia)

Now I'm forced to come down from Cloud 9 to the harsh reality of 2012. As I mentioned earlier, repeat purchase happened once again in 2011 November. This time it was a C6-00; which costed me 14000 INR, a couple of thousands I spent tried fixing it and a well-connected life. After 4 months of buying it, the problem started in the form of no display on slide (it's a slide and touch phone). I promptly took it to the nearest Nokia care, which was not really near and they returned the phone fixed in a week's time. I was glad to see it fully functional again, but only to realize after a week that the proximity sensor is not working anymore. After considering the distance I had to travel in a not-so-well connected West Indian town, I settled to live with the proximity sensorless phone.

Nokia C6-00
(Image courtesy: John.Karakatsanis's photo stream on Flickr)

The chain of issues did not end there, the same problem came up again two months back and this time the phone was completely dead. I gave it again to a service centre and after an expensive repair of nearly 2000 rupees, it worked fine for another five days. When I'm writing this post, the phone is in non-responsive condition. I am just wondering what happened with the once market leader Nokia? Now, they are clearly miles behind when it comes to technology compared to android powered phones, iPhones or BlackBerrys. Then again Nokia phones were durable, if nothing else and sadly it's 'were' and not 'are'.

Clearly, now I have to depend on my 7 year old Nokia 2300 for some more time as the supposedly smarter C6 is dying a silent death. Moreover, even at its optimal best, the phone was not worth the money compared to N70 when it comes to music or image quality, and internet connectivity was nothing less than painful!

With the number of options available in the mobile phone market, I might not come back to pick up a new Nokia phone. That's the end of a 7 year old customer-brand relationship!

I think, Nokia's case is a prime example of how market complacency kills companies, more on it later.

PS: It seems like Microsoft backed out from buying Nokia, not a surprise move though.

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