PC Pro blog » Nokia

The worst tech of 2011

Jonathan Bray — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 09:39:57 +0000

There’s nothing more exciting than getting your hands on the latest technology. Occasionally, though, a product comes along that falls completely flat, or has a fatal flaw; a product that really should never have got past the design stage in the first place, let alone into the factory and onto the shelves.

You might think we hated these products, but in their own inimitable way they’re just as fun to write about as the market leaders. So, for your delectation and ours, we’ve compiled our favourites from the past 12 months: the PC Pro rogues gallery…

The garage sale that never happened

Never in one year has one company done so much to sully the name of tech industry PR. It started out with a marketing campaign so mysterious it would have stumped Scooby Doo and the gang.

“Who is TabCo?” a series of viral videos asked. My initial response was “who cares?” but the persistence of the campaign finally hooked me in.

It turns out that TabCo was, in fact, Fusion Garage – the company behind the massively disappointing Joojoo tablet. And it was preparing to launch a product like no other. A tablet to upstage the iPad 2. Fusion Garage impresario, Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan, even had the hubris to arrange an Apple-esque stage event to launch the Grid10.

We were surprised, when Rathakrishnan toured the publishing establishments with the Grid10, to find ourselves quietly impressed. We weren’t surprised to discover soon after that delivery of our review sample had been delayed, then delayed again, culminating in this month’s rumours of the company’s eventual demise.

We haven’t had the opportunity to properly test the Grid10, but that doesn’t matter any more. The worst sort of product is one that gets your hopes up, and then fails to deliver – catastrophically in this case – and it deserves its place on our list.

I go. You go. Who go? MeeGo

Remember MeeGo? No? I’m not suprpised, so let me enlighten you. A joint venture between two of the biggest technology companies in the world – Intel and Nokia – it was supposed to be a replacement for Symbian, Nokia’s ageing mobile OS.

Yet when top executives decided to draw up a roadmap, laying out where the company would be by 2014, they realised they were on track to release only three handsets based on MeeGo over the next three years.

Chief development officer Kai Oistamo memorably called it Nokia’s “oh s**t’ moment” and we wouldn’t disagree. Soon after, Nokia switched track and signed a deal with Microsoft to put Windows Phone on its handsets.

Trouble is, we’re still not convinced the Finnish giant has turned the corner, with the Lumia 800 the only handset we’ve seen and only one more – the Lumia 710 – imminent.

A touch of madness

The HP TouchPad made quite an impression when it arrived in the PC Pro labs back in July. We liked the hardware and loved the operating system, but we weren’t impressed with the lack of apps.

Given time, we hoped, apps would flourish and the TouchPad would become a viable alternative. It was just a shame HP hadn’t been brave enough to challenge Apple on price.

A month passed, and then came what was one of the most baffling and bizarre events I’ve witnessed in the technology industry. HP canned the TouchPad after six weeks of (admittedly sluggish) sales, retired its entire smartphone offering and put webOS on ice.

It then had a massive fire sale, slashing the cost of the 16GB version of the tablet to £89 and the 32GB to £115. They sold out in minutes, wherever they appeared, and yet HP stuck to its guns and left the poor old TouchPad alone and abandoned.

A sorry tale indeed, but at least a handful of enterprising bargain-hunters (including our very own Darien Graham-Smith) got their hands on a tablet for comparative peanuts.

Read in the water

Aside from Amazon, Kobo and Sony, is there anyone out there that truly understands what makes a good ebook reader? When we gathered the best the industry had to offer together earlier this year, we were hoping to discover a hidden gem.

Alas the rest of the contenders, from BeBook, iriver, and Greenreader – failed to float our literary boat – offering either suspect ergonomics, performance that would make watching paint dry an exercise in high entertainment, or both.

Worst of all, though, were the prices. With Amazon’s new Kindle pricing, none of the others even came close to offering the sort of value needed to compete.

It is still possible to produce a competitive product, as Kobo and Sony proved, so come on the rest – how about joining in too?

AMD’s dozy moment

AMD must be wondering where it all went wrong. A few years back the company’s CPUs were dominating at the budget end of the market and the future looked bright. Its CPUs might not have matched the sheer grunt of Intel’s products, but they were always top of PC Pro’s bang per buck charts.

The new Bulldozer architecture (aka AMD FX) was meant to revive AMD’s fortunes; however, if the first example – the FX-8150 – is any proof, it’s fallen disastrously behind. When we tested it in October we found it wasn’t cheap or quick enough to give even Intel’s mid-range Core i5 a run for its money.

That situation hasn’t changed in the intervening months, in fact it’s got worse, with AMD struggling to get the product out of the door in sufficient volume. Here’s hoping 2012 brings a rosier outlook – otherwise Intel will have no challenger. And nobody wants that.

A bitter pill

As the tablet market matures we’re gradually weaning out the really poor products, but occasionally something crops up that astonishes with its deficiency of quality.

On paper, the Storage Options Scroll looked a decent deal: a 7in Android tablet with a capacitive, multitouch display and attractive aluminium unibody chassis for well under 200 quid.

What’s not to like? Well, as it turns out, pretty much everything.

No Android Market, no performance and not much responsiveness from the touchscreen display. It was so frustrating, I can vividly remember pounding my fist on my forehead in fury.

It’s just as well we have safety locks on the windows in the office, or it might well have found itself taking flying lessons too.

3D or not 3D?

At the big mobile industry show in Barcelona, one of the most intriguing launches was LG’s 3D smartphone, the Optimus 3D. As well as packing a dual-core mobile processor and a lovely-looking 4in IPS screen, this phone featured two cameras on the rear for shooting true stereoscopic stills and video.

Best of all, though, the display could be switched into 3D mode, allowing those shots and video to be viewed without the need for special glasses. The phone also came with a selection of 3D games, ready to play.

Generally, aside from a little too much fat around the waist, we liked the phone, and found the 3D screen remarkably effective – until we realised it wouldn’t last a day on a single charge. Even moderate use saw the gauge nosedive alarmingly towards zero, completely undermining one of the most interesting smartphone launches of the year.

Split personality

We don’t see many truly awful products trail their way through the PC Pro offices. Misguided ones, on the other hand, are quite common, and Acer spat out a prime example in March.

The Iconia Tab W500 was a netbook/tablet hybrid running Windows 7, with a screen you could dock with a keyboard, a bit like the Asus Eee Pad Transformer, but with Windows 7 instead of Android.

The trouble with the W500 was that it was unwieldy in both tablet and netbook mode, and the hinge was poorly designed and so fragile that it was already beginning to break by the time we’d finished reviewing it.

Then, of course, there’s the perennial problem that Windows 7 just doesn’t work as a touch interface. Windows 8 should resolve that old chestnut once and for all. For now, though, can we have a ban on touch-based Windows products. Please?

How to install free country maps on your Nokia phone

Tim Danton — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 18:03:52 +0000

The current issue of PC Pro includes a road test of satnav devices – from a standalone device produced by TomTom to the freebies that come with new Nokia phones and Android mobiles. (If you’re based in the UK, you’ll be able to buy the issue until Wednesday 14 July.)

However, during our research for that feature we endured almost an hour of hitting brick walls when attempting to download maps directly to a Nokia phone. And that’s a real shame, as Nokia has one of the more interesting pieces of satnav software, and it generously provides free maps for every country we can think of.

Showing a sense of humour we really didn’t appreciate, Nokia’s online instructions made you run around in circles. Click here, it said. No, here! No, not there, here! But we’re back where we were at the start, we cursed. Much anger ensued.

While Nokia has improved things in the past few weeks, to the extent that there is actually some sound advice on its “Find and download new maps page”, it’s still confusing to the Ovi Maps newcomer.

But fear not: here’s a step-by-step guide explaining exactly what to do and how to avoid the pitfalls Nokia doesn’t consider important enough to actually explain in any depth.

Step 1: Head to nokia.co.uk/maps

Above you’ll see the homepage. Now you should click on “Free country maps”, on the left-hand side under Free Downloads, which will take you to…

Step 2: Select your phone

… this page. Where, logically, you select your phone. We’ve got the E72 on loan right now, so we’re going to select that one from the dropdown menu…

Step 3: Install Ovi Maps on your phone

While there will be a version of Ovi Maps on your phone already, it probably isn’t the most up to date version. So, download Ovi Maps (just follow the automatic prompts), connect your phone in PC Suite mode, and then install Ovi Maps on the phone itself.

Step 4: The gotcha

All looks good. Except it isn’t. The crucial piece of advice is tucked away on the right-hand screen: to add maps to your phone you need to have Nokia Ovi Suite installed on your computer.

This isn’t to be confused with Nokia PC Suite, which is the suite you’re more likely to have installed. (A separate piece of map-loading software used to be provided to accompany Nokia PC Suite, but it it’s no longer available.)

If you do have Nokia PC Suite installed then uninstall it.

Step 5: Install Nokia Ovi Suite

Install Nokia Ovi Suite. Annoyingly, you may have to reboot your PC.

Step 6: Download the maps

With Ovi Suite installed, you can finally download the maps to your phone. Or, more precisely, to your desktop PC, at which point they’ll be transferred to your phone.

Open Ovi Maps on your computer, then click on View | Go to | Maps. Note that your phone needs to be connected to the PC at this point; make sure it’s in Nokia PC Suite mode rather than USB Mass Storage or anything else.

And from this point on, it really is easy. Ovi Suite handles the process of putting the files on your phone, which means that when you’re out and about you won’t need to suffer the pain (and potential expense) of downloading over 3G.

Iran: Will Nokia achieve what Bush couldn’t?

Darien Graham-Smith — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 14:52:44 +0000

Over the past week I’ve been dipping into the flood of “tweets” pouring out of Tehran. And I’ve been impressed: primarily, of course, by the spirit of the Iranian people, but also by the way Twitter has kept me informed with an immediacy and rawness that mainstream media coverage can’t match. What we’re seeing in the east is a landmark event, not only in geopolitical history, but also in the history of the internet

But while Twitter has undoubtedly played a major role in events, there’s a technology which I think has been even more pivotal. I’m talking about camera-phones — such as the one that captured the last living moments of a young Iranian woman named Neda, shot dead during a protest on Saturday in the streets of Tehran.

The shocking footage has quickly propagated around the web, arousing horror and outrage in Iran and across the globe. Without a doubt it’s given the protests new fuel and new focus: I’ve seen more than one Iranian Twitterer describe Neda’s death as the turning point that persuaded them to join the uprising.

Interestingly, though, it’s been unofficially estimated that on the day Neda died, over a hundred other protesters were also killed in Iran — yet no one’s rallying around them.

Partly, of course, that could be because Neda was a young woman, who appears to have been acting wholly peacefully when she was murdered. It’s easy to get angry about her death, while with other protestors we simply don’t know the circumstances.

But that’s the important point: we don’t know, because however tragic the other deaths may have been, they weren’t captured on video. We can only ever know of them at second hand. And for that reason they’ll never provoke a reaction as visceral and emotional as what we feel when we actually see the life slowly fade from Neda’s eyes.

Clearly, it’s impossible to say what will happen in Iran over the coming days and weeks, but the protests don’t seem to be petering out — if anything, dissatisfaction with the regime is growing. With a general strike now brewing alongside continued unrest we could conceivably be heading for a major shake-up of power in Iran.

And any success the protesters achieve will have been made possible not by external influence — but by the camera-phone, and the incredible rallying power of a humble video file.

Yesterday once more on the Nokia E71

Barry Collins — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 14:02:28 +0000

I’m not sure if one of Nokia’s engineers is a closet Carpenters’ fan, but it’s been yesterday once more on my Nokia E71 an awful lot recently. I’m suddenly interrupted half-way through the day with a reminder for a meeting that I attended yesterday, because the phone has arbitrarily decided to turn the clock back 24 hours.

It’s the most bizarre bug I’ve encountered on a phone – and it appears I’m not the only one suffering from E-series Groundhog Day. This post on the Nokia Support Forum speculates that the problem occurs when you turn the phone off overnight, with the date occasionally failing to roll over correctly.

I’ve tried setting the phone to synchronise the date with the network, but that doesn’t appear to work. Has anyone else come across this bizarre bug? Or found a way to cure it? Let me know on comments below. I’ll read them yesterday.

Just in: Nokia E71

Tim Danton — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:40:13 +0000

I was quite impressed by the handfeel* of the Toshiba Portégé G710 when I reviewed it last week, but it is as nothing to the E71. This drop-dead sexy beast is satisfyingly weighty, with the metal chassis perfectly fitting its boardroom looks.

So far, I also prefer the Nokia’s slightly larger keys. There’s no space between them, so theoretically you could accidentally nudge the wrong one, but this hasn’t yet been an issue.

Another big advantage is speed, with the Symbian OS here proving much, much more responsive than the Toshiba G710 running Windows Mobile 6.

One of Nokia’s biggest selling points, though, is ease-of-setup. Just enter your email address and password, the marketing chief claimed, and then worry no more – everything would just work. And with support for “thousands” of ISPs, it’s more likely than not that it will.

I tried it with my Gmail account, but initially hit a problem with the setup routine – it was using Vodafone Live! to connect rather than the usual Vodafone internet access point. Once I’d corrected this, though, it worked like a dream. Well, a slightly dull dream involving access to email via a phone.

I’ll keep on using the phone over the next few days, so look out for the full review soon.

*Handfeel. n. 1 Like mouthfeel, but in the hand.

How long does your phone take to boot?

Barry Collins — Thu, 01 May 2008 14:20:51 +0000

David Fearon recently lamented the fact that, from the moment he presses the power button, his bleeding-edge PC takes a staggering seven-and-a-half minutes to doing anything vaguely useful. Well, I’ve begun to notice that today’s so-called “smartphones” are becoming similarly sluggish.

I own a reasonably bog-standard Nokia N73. In the smartphone world, this is the equivalent of a 2:1 from an ex-Polytechnic, as compared to say, the first-class honours from Oxford that is the Apple iPhone. There’s a mere smattering of non-core applications installed on the thing – the Opera Mini browser, the Gmail mobile app. No antivirus software or anything else that could potentially interfere with the boot process.

So why on earth does it take 50 seconds to get from pressing the power button to a phone that can actually, well, phone? I always turn my phone off at night to save battery and stop random drunk idiots waking me up at 4am in the morning, when they dial the number their mate Carl had 12 years ago. But should I wake up one night to find my house burning to the ground with only my mobile in reach, I’ll be suing Nokia for the 50 seconds it took my phone to kick into life, display a gruesome welcome message, and blast out that infuriatingly twee jingle, while my family are busy choking on the fumes.

And I bet the N73 isn’t the worst offender, either. Let us know how long your phone takes to wake up using the comments feature below.