Why is everyone disappointed with the Nokia N96?
When Nokia introduced the N95 in the market last year, it was praised by everyone as a revolutionary new device. That makes sense because the N95 was the first and the most practical all-in-one convergent device. It had GPS, a usable 5 megapixel camera, good sound quality, accelerated video and support for high speed 3G networks. For many people, it replaced the necessity of carrying multiple devices. Nokia also kept its end users happy by providing frequent firmware upgrades which fixed bugs and introduced new features. To top it all, Nokia also introduced the N95 8GB, which fixed many of the problems like battery life, RAM size and build quality issues which plagued the initial model.
The N96, which was announced recently, failed to match the excitement of the announcement of N95. This is understandable as most people expect a “revolutionary” device whenever a flagship product is launched. N96 provides marginal improvements (and disappointment in some aspects like the battery capacity) over its predecessor instead of adding anything new, except for the DVB-H capability. Even the DVB-H is not a new feature to the N Series as the N77 has offered this for more than a year now. All this put together has made the end users less enthusiastic about this new device.
The truth is, convergence has already hit the ceiling. Most mainstream entertainment including music, movies, gaming, browsing and photography are all available on any high end mobile device today. The new devices strive to improve the end users experience on these devices rather than introducing anything new. I think this is a trend that we will see for the next couple of years to come. I would call the year 2008 as the year of “mobile technology disappointment” as we are going to see more of such disappointments in the future.
One another thing to blame for the cold reception of Nokia N96 is the product naming. Had Nokia called this as the N95i or N95 16GB, the disappointments would have been lesser, thus turning the attention to the other demo of MWC, the S60 touch. By calling it the N96, Nokia changed or increased the end user expectations of this device.
