Get an N95, buy AAPL

November 04, 2007 · See comments

I recently got the Nokia N95 – and I promptly went out and bought more stock in Apple.

For a flagship product, it’s nothing short of embarrassing. It’s got nice features on paper, but they plain doesn’t work.

The camera has a great lens and great resolution, but it takes literally 5 seconds to get ready for a shoot, by which time your motive is long gone. 5 seconds doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re just idling, waiting for the fucking phone to get its act together, it feels like eons.

The GPS has not yet been able to pick out my position, despite having had plenty of attempts. I was in Barcelona for a week when it was all fresh, and I’d been looking forward to trying the GPS on navigating a foreign city. I could see the maps alright, but the core GPS feature of picking out which spot on that map I was currently on plain never worked for me.

The build quality feels cheap, and the double-slider mechanism is worse than useless. The only thing it does for me is accidentally slide out the wrong way every other time I pull the phone out of my pocket, with the result that the music player, which I neither use nor want, opens up, and I now have to wait another 3-5 seconds before the phone is ready to respond to what I pulled it up for.

I could go on and on, but the harsh reality is that it’s an amazingly poor product. When you add to that the price tag, it’s a disgrace. The iPhone is currently $399 without the plan, while the N95 is double that and up.

And Apple has just gotten started. If you look at how they introduced the iPod, they’re guaranteed to introduce new models pretty fast – new colors, new features, smaller phones, cheaper phones. They’re going to own a huge chunk of the mobile phone market, and who’s going to challenge them? Nokia? SonyEricsson? Samsung? Hardly.

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Comments ↓

1 robin // Nov 05, 2007 at 10:02 AM

Thing is, is AAPL still a good deal, or has it's share-price a healthy premium due to over-optimism already. In other words, have other people concluded the same thing a lot earlier and now everybody's seeing it (hence the price appreciation)? Did I transfer any fear there Lars? :O)
2 jarkko // Nov 05, 2007 at 05:20 PM

You just made me experience a kind of a deja vu feeling: http://jlaine.net/2007/9/19/iphone-vs-nokia-e90-communicator
3 Lars Pind // Nov 08, 2007 at 12:20 PM

Yes, there's always that, and I don't know how to do the math on that. But it seems to be the case that when a company does something smart, and makes more money, their stock price goes up, even if presumably people who purchased the stock earlier knew that they were probably going to do smart things.
4 RasmusJ // Nov 22, 2007 at 05:05 PM

Methinks Apple is getting too snobbish - I'm guessing the production costs of an iPhone are magnitudes below $999: http://www.computerworld.dk/art/42802?a=rss&i=0 I'll never need it THAT much.
5 Lau // Nov 23, 2007 at 05:45 PM

@RasmusJ: The 999 euro unlocked iPhone is just a simple way of living up to German legislation. They don't actually want to sell any or make any money from it.
6 messels // Dec 19, 2007 at 06:37 PM

wow. good to know. i have 100 shares of nok that i'm thinking i should dump. i was already thinking they were in a bad position but this review of their product is...well...embarrassing! cheers
7 Lars Pind // Dec 19, 2007 at 11:00 PM

@messels: I switched to the iPhone now, and I haven't looked back. Nice blog design, btw :)

Lars Pind

internet software, coaching, and entrepreneurship