Brave New World

The world is changing.  There was a time that a phone was a phone.  You made calls, maybe took pictures, and that was it.

Today a phone is a small computer.  It has my diary, my pictures, my numbers.  It syncs with various services, accesses many wireless networks and does a myriad of other things.

So what?  Well So I do not want to do a factory restore!  In my phone I have wireless keys for numerous hot spots I regularly use, but I do not have record of these keys.  I have finally managed to settle down the syncing so that I do not get duplicates all over the place.  My address book has settled down.  Do I want to go though all that pain again?  NO!

The does come a point at which I will just say sod it.  I will ditch the so called smart phone and just use a dumb phone.  Or maybe I will be like 90% of the rest of the population and will just use the phone for calling and pictures.  When I upgrade the phone I will loose all my pictures and have to re-enter all the numbers by hand.  Just like a friend of mine that has just posted on FaceBook “Please inbox (Grrrr..  she means email)  me you number, my phone has gone and I have lost the lot!”.  Yer right! I can really see me doing that!

Phone companies have to realise that their devices are now computers and they form and integral part of peoples lives.  I cannot be without my phone for a week while you blow it away!  I do not want weeks of agro setting it up again.  You have to treat this things like what they are.  When they fail your staff have to be skilled enough to get in to the guts and fix them!  I was impressed when the tech in Manila remote controlled my phone, that is the way it SHOULD be done.  I was not impressed when all he did was bugger up my access point priorities and reinstall the app I was trying to fix.  Here’s the news.  "I ALREADY DID THAT!”.

Nokia are already in trouble as they have dropped the ball with the N97 and the N8 (as it was basically obsolete before it was released).  The N8 is a good phone.  It has a great camera, a real flash and in general I like the way it works.  The problem is that it is slow and the touch is not great.

I am looking forward to getting a Windows 7 based Nokia.  Don’t get me wrong, I like Symbian.  I have been using it since I hade a Psion 5!  It is just a shame it has fallen behind, both in performance and in technology.  I like Nokia engineering. The phone looks good and feels good.  Now get the innards up to spec and we will all be happy.

But PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE get the support people up to speed and change the mentality.  A factory reset HAS to be the LAST thing you do when ALL else has failed.  And there MUST be a way of imaging the phone so that when the factory reset has not fixed the issue I can at the very least get back EXACTLY where I was when we started (just restoring my data is NOT enough).  At least that way I will not be in a worse off position than when I started.

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