Day of packages

After the two-day weekend, when I reached work, I was greeted at my desk by a package that hard arrived from my Mom. It contained the ‘idli podi’, the kind of dry chutney/masala that you have with dosas and idlis. I was very happy. But that was not the end of it.

In the afternoon, I received a package from @WOMWorldNokia with a Nokia X7 that I am supposed to test for 2 weeks. For those who don’t quite know the saga behind it, you can read it  here.

The first impressions when I opened the box were not very encouraging. Despite the surprise and the awe after receiving the package, almost everyone thought that X7 looked bad. These are the various reactions that I got.

'Ugly', 'Not Good Looking', 'Looks like a coffin', 'Uggh!', and 'Okay'.

I came back home and made dosas and had them with the idli powder. I also opened the X7 package and found that it doesn’t have a user manual in English. So I was even wary of putting it to charging. But eventually I did.

The only good thing that happened after that was that it immediately hooked on to my Wi-Fi at the apartment. I tried browsing on the default browser. It sucked. The screen resolution sucked. The you tube videos won’t load on full screen. There is no pinch zoom. The screen is not as responsive as you would like.

So, I downloaded Opera Mini and Opera Mobile to test. Both got downloaded (and probably installed). But I can’t find them. That’s it, I can’t find my way around the phone. The interface also sucks. The home screen is not as customizable or user friendly as the Android ones are.

I haven’t sill put a sim card in it. I’ll probably do that tomorrow/Thursday. Let’s see if it stops sucking even a little bit.

Nokia X7

So, I was on my way to work and there was a TOI front-page ad about the new smartphones that Nokia was launching. One was a touchscreen model, the other was a candy bar model, and the third one – well, it deserves to be mentioned – called X7 seemed like a touchscreen model made when the designer at Nokia had a really, really bad day.

The X7 has the strangest design that I have seen. The corners are chipped off in an unnatural fashion – remember that Nokia always believed in curves? - and the phone is thicker at the top and bottom. All the three models were running the new Symbian OS – Symbian Anna.

My immediate reaction was “Yuck,” and I posted it on Twitter. This was yesterday.

Later on, I got a tweet from @WOMWorldNokia saying that maybe I have jumped to an early conclusion and I might actually like X7 once I get my hands on it. They also asked me if I wanted to test drive one. I said I wouldn’t mind – Symbian Anna was worth it, I thought.

Today, I had the most pleasant interaction with a guy called Paul (from somewhere in the UK) over e-mail and finally I have agreed to test drive an X7 for 2 weeks. They will ship me the phone in some time. I’m really looking forward to testing it.

Now, the one thing that I want to say is that I was pleasantly surprised at the professional way guys at @WOMWorldNokia respond to criticism and convert Nokia haters into potential users. Kudos to them! :) Watch out for my full review of Nokia X7 later!

Sorry for being judgmental

I grew up to Nokia mobile phones. The first two phones that I had were Nokia. Since then, however, not just because I moved on to a better company (read Sony Ericsson), I have seen the company and their phones going from bad to worse. Much before the iPhone/Android invasion into the mobile space, Nokia started losing the plot.

Handset-wise, even now, everything they make seems like a copy of some other brand. But the real flaw in their set up was the good-for-nothing OS that they had. Symbian or not, every other company was making progress to do something about improving the OS. Blackberry had it’s own. All the other major brands went Android. And iPhone had iOS. Nokia just got stuck in that bad place.

Now, they are going to drop their Symbian platform and go for the Windows Mobile OS. If you are a PC user, you would have started hating Windows as soon as you started using it. Why did Nokia have to go for the worst amongst them all?

This is why I have decided that, as on this date 25/06/2011, anybody buying a new Nokia phone has to be either dumb or stupid. Either of those. Or both or those. Why would you buy Nokia when you have so many better options available.

If you think that I’m the only one out here who thinks like this, please check your social networks once more. You will realize for yourself.