• Tweet
• Sharebar

Nokia (Stephen Elop),

We’ve had a hell of a run.

My first real cell phone was a Nokia 5190, the second, a Nokia 6190. I upgraded to a Nokia 8290, and rolled into a Nokia N90 the second you released a truly high-end phone in a place I could obtain it. In the late 90′s, I played snake, hacked your software, and learned everything I needed to learn about mobile. You showed me the light outside of the evil Motorola StarTac days, you showed me the future of cellular communications. You showed me that the device wasn’t just a phone.

As time progressed, you gave me a hell of a camera and great features (for the time) with the N-series. The N90 was huge, heavy, and feature rich. It was built well, and the software wasn’t all that bad. I must have taken 1,000 pictures with that thing.

I moved to the Nokia N95-3 within a month of it’s release. I got my mitts on an N96 and the N95 8GB. Symbian was great, not perfect, but robust enough, stable enough, worked well enough, and all the while – you never forgot that the device wasn’t just a phone, but it was still a phone. It worked, and it worked when the other guys’ phones didn’t, in places other people with other AT&T phones were left without bars.

Those assholes over at Apple didn’t have a damn thing on you, outside of a marketing platform and an iTunes app-store. They didn’t know a damn thing about wireless communications or the mobile market. They still don’t. I saw all the amazing software applications (and a truck-load of crap ones) on my friends’ iPhones, and never wavered. I went out and bought the N900.

The N900 to me was a brick from the get go. I knew it before I bought it, but wanted to get nerd on my mobile device again – like I used to back when I had the 5190. For that, it’s amazing. I looked at the N8, because I was aiming at getting a device that “just worked” when I didn’t want to use XChat or XTerminal. But the on-screen keyboard-only thing dissuaded me, so I was going to wait for this upcoming Meego device.

I grew to enjoy Maemo, it wasn’t Symbian – which I started to hate after using the N95 for 2 years. Maemo was BUFF, super buff. With the adoption of Intel, I knew you two could come up with something incredible, regardless of being 4 years late to the app-store party. It wouldn’t matter to me, I know innovation is what Nokia does. Nokia, to me, brought things to mobile that would never have been here hadn’t you done all those incredible things (reference Nokia patents on Google for details).

The day you signed on an ex-Microsoft exec to be the CEO of your company, I became skeptical. I didn’t want to utter a word of it, as though I didn’t want to jinx the release of Meego, or perhaps the N9. Then you did it. You made the decision that is going to send me right back to Motorola after over a god-damned decade of dedication, loyalty, cheerleading, chest beating and flat-out bragging about Nokia to everyone I knew.

Read my posts, go on, try it – search “enrique gutierrez nokia”, you’ll see it all over the damn Internet. I’ve been a free evangelist for your company for years, and here you are sticking it in your fans’ asses and breaking it off. Your abandonment of your innovations for a “favorable business model” in efforts to regain market-share is going to kill you. You’re going to drowned in your own poor decisions, and, you know what? Like a pissed of ex, I’m probably going to be happy to see it. I’m probably going to cheer, as I regretfully join the masses upon masses of ex-Nokia fans as they jump ship to Android.

The devout Nokia fans hate iOS. We loathe the thought of converting. If we wanted to turn our backs on your sub-standard clunky operating system, Symbian, we would have done that shit in 2007 when all the iSheep were lining up outside those damned stores. If we wanted Android, we would have gone to it in 2009… easily. You pick Windows Phone 7, after the Kin tanks, after Windows Mobile 6.5 took a dump all over itself. You pick Windows Phone 7… Why? Because all eighteen people that have a Zune really like the interface?

You’re greedy assholes that have shown your need to get on your knees in front of your stockholders, while feeding anti-freeze to the people that pay them, your customers.

To hell with you, your poor decisions, and your total selling out of your fans, loyalists, developers, and future.

02.16.11 • posted in: Technology