Thursday, October 21, 2010
Ok, I have to say, Nokia has been screwing around with device names. It takes ages to have that vocabulary in your brain. So when your friend says, hei have you checked out how slim is that Nokia 6500 classic? Obviously your answer will be "wait a sec.. what device was that?" and your friends starts explaing, "you know, the one which looks like.... "

How boring could those numbers be? 6500, 3230, bla bla !!


As if those numbers meant anything! The numbers are as random as it could get! Okay, if Nokia has to use numbers other than any human-readable names, why not assign some meaning to it? It could be so that
  • - First number tells whether it's S60, S40 etc.
  • - Second number could tell about the physical type, candybar/calmshell etc.
  • - Third number could indicate input type: keypad, full qwerty, touch, touch and full qwerty etc.
  • - Fourth... Be innovative Nokia !!! Use some brain !!!

No.. Nokia wants you, the dealers, the developers and the platform developers (who have to remember two names, for example 'Tube' is the internal product name for 5800, which somehow got leaked and many websites now use the word 'Tube') practice for years to remember those names.. "YOU CANNOT FORGET"

Nokia device names!!!

Okay, I guess I have done enough whining. Now let's talk about the new practice Nokia invented to confuse you to the most !!

I needed a Symbian^3 for work. I was very busy so I just made a request to another team member to order Nokia C6, which appeared to be the cheapest (I was actually a little surprised to notice how fast Nokia managed to deliver it to the market, as it was announced just a few weeks ago).

Anyway the phone came and what the hell....

This ain't a Symbian^3 !! It's S60 5th, so called Symbian^1 !!!

I am cutting the story short now... this is what I found! There exists two C6 !!

  • C6-00 : S60 5th edition, Qwerty keyboard, resistive touch screen
  • C6-01 : Symbian ^3, No keyboard, capacitive touch
These are two completely different devices!!!

C6-01
C6-00


Do you want to know how Nokia presented those devices on their home page? Yaps.. for both the devices, it said "Nokia C6" !!! Only if you open your eyes wider, you will find the 00/01 on the right corner!!

Nokia C6 00 as seen on Nokia home page


Nokia C6 01 as seen on Nokia home page

So obviously I had to return the device, wondering how many others are returning as me!

There has been previously similar cases of adding this 00, 01 numbering, but that made some sense, because it was to indicate some minor upgrade has been done (e.g. internal software has been upgraded).

For example, C5-00 and C5-01. Notice how they buttons are different, but overall the devices are same.




Lesson learnt : From now on, don't count on only the device name, look for the version 00 or 01 etc.

Looking forward to those days, when I can clean up my brain and throw all the meaningless device names I have learnt.

P.S. Not relevant, but as I have already told bad stuffs, so why not adding a few more notes. I have the new N8 on my desk, and guess what... it sucks (comparing the price)
  1. I had big hope for the capacitive touch... but well, it did not feel even close to the iphone responsiveness.
  2. The default theme is ugly boring blue!!! How uglier could those options menu be !!
  3. Same old UI (where touch support is just glued on top of key based UI) with same old options menu stuffs!
  4. Okay there is multi touch support, you can zoom in and out in some applications (like browser, picture gallery), but that was not really feeling smooth. (May be nice enough if someone has not used iphone4)
  5. The weired top and bottom corner design just didnot feel like Nokia !! Some may like the shape, but at least I didnot. (and I heard from others the same too)
  6. The only 'wow' effect I got was from the camera, perhaps that's what that worths your hard earned money.
  7. In summary, I think hardware-wise it's an awesome device, with all those multimedia support. It's the software where Nokia needs a big boost (lets cross the finger for upcoming meego).
Lastly, I came to know how bad Nokia's marketing is (sometimes) when a somewhat long term Nokia user asked me, hei what's those Ovi stuffs? What does Ovi mean?
 
posted by Gagan at 10/21/2010 03:42:00 PM | Permalink |


0 Comments: