Three Days with a Phone

I know marketing people are in love with market segmentation. They sit all day long thinking which features business people need, which are mostly used by consumers and which are most desired by early adopter. This “productive” thinking gave birth to, for example, the Nokia E61 (without the camera) which was quickly replaced by it successor the Nokia E61i (the one WITH the camera).

This segmentation causes one major problem for me: I can’t get a business phone (Nokia Eseries, Blackberry etc) with a decent camera.

Who says that a business person does not need a good camera? I can also ask the same question from the opposite side: who says that high end consumers do not want decent email capabilities with their phones (including active standby plugin, for example)?

In the recent years I used (quite regularly) the following phones:

1. HTC Tytn
2. HTC Tytn II
3. Nokia E90
4. Nokia N73
5. Nokia E61i
6. Nokia N95

Do you see a pattern here? I realized that I jumped back and forth between Nokia Nseries and Eseries - why (you may ask)? well, the answer is simple - when I was focused on taking photos I needed a decent camera so I used Nokia Nseries. When I needed email mostly I used Nokia Eseries or HTC Tytn II.

When I recently tested the Nokia E71 I was so frustrated with its camera that I return to (hmm hmmm) my old E61i. I’m not greedy - I would be satisfied with a medium resolution camera such as the Nokia N73 (so long as it has the same lens as the N73) although I would love to have a combination of, for example, Blackberry bold and the 8MP camera from SonyEricsson C905.

The funny result is that I compromised on the OS and stability…instead of using a Symbian phone (which I really like) I’m using HTC tytn II which has a reasonable 3MP camera, good email support and….terrible UI and an OS that I need to re-flash once a month.

I say - ENOUGH! I want to have both. Give me a E71 form factor device with a good camera or Nseries phone with QWERTY keyboard and decent email support (with active standby plugin) and I’m yours forever. It is not as the so-called business phones are cheap. Really, If I’m already paying hundreds of dollars for a “business phone” I will pay few extra $$$ to get a good camera.

I have a colleague at my second home (also known as my work) that every time he is angry of something going wrong he issues email titled “ENOUGH”. We all know that when such email arrives we need to take cover and expect fire-spitting email explaining why we are doing something wrong.

Well, I decided to adopt this method and start my own Enough post series discussing things that I think are wrong in mobile phones, mobile technology and whatever I think is worthwhile being fed up with.

Come to think of it, the first post was actually already publiched under the title “On J2ME Signing or how J2ME signatures kill mobile innovation” which discussed aspects of J2ME development which really annoy me.