I'm sorry but that's a load of rubbish. This comes up again and again on All About Symbian and it's always just as ridiculous. You only have to apply a bit of common sense to see how ridiculous it is.

Why on earth would a customer not being satisfied with a Nokia encourage them to buy more Nokias?

Surely people who aren't satisfied with a product would just switch to another brand? If you don't like Coke you buy Pepsi instead, you don't start buying other Coke products in the hope that they taste better.

I agree that Nokia and other device manufacturers deliberately leave stuff out on cheaper models in order to segment the market, but this conspiracy theory that there's a "perfect" phone being held back ranks right up there with cars that run on water.

I also agree that new features are continually being added to phones, but that happens due to new technologies being made available on a commercial scale. The manufacturers aren't deliberately holding stuff back, they simply wouldn't have the ability to add those features to a viable product. Features might exist in prototypes and as separate devices, but there's a world of difference between separate devices and embedded features. (For example 10 years ago there were GPS receivers but it would have been impossible to embed GPS receivers in a mass production phone due to cost, size and power issues. Nowadays GPS is available even in cheap compact models with small batteries, but that's due to small cheap power-efficient GPS chips becoming available from suppliers.)

In any case, what exactly would this "perfect" phone be?

If you add every possible hardware and software feature you'll end up with something horribly expensive that hardly anyone can afford to buy. But even that wouldn't be a perfect phone.

Who exactly is a perfect phone meant to be for? My parents just use their phone for calls, texts and photos, so most other features would be a waste of money for them. Their "perfect" phone would be something that just did calls, texts and photos, so for them any additional features would be seen as a total waste of money. Even technology nerds can suffer from this problem, for example the hugely expensive N96 has a DVB-H receiver which most tech journalists labelled a waste of money as so few countries have DVB-H services. So leaving certain features out can actually make a phone more attractive to its users.

Even if cost wasn't an issue, how would you combine features that cannot be combined, e.g. how do you simultaneously make a compact phone with a large QWERTY keyboard? Or an ultra-thin phone with the highest quality camera? (The highest quality cameras require a certain physical distance between the lens and receptor so they cannot be used in the thinnest phones.)

What about form factors, how would you make a phone that was simultaneously a clamshell, slider and monoblock, both with and without a touchscreen? What if someone wants a phone that is both matt plastic and glossy steel? At some point a choice has to be made that makes a phone attractive to some but unattractive to others.

And even if a perfect phone was possible, why isn't ANYONE making it right now? Nokia isn't the only phone maker, why isn't Samsung or S-E or LG or Moto or Apple making a perfect phone? Why are all of their phone models imperfect in some way?

If designing and developing each model involves X amount of money, and people only buy one phone at a time, why would any manufacturer want to artificially create demand for many models?

The real reason for "imperfect" phones isn't a conspiracy to manipulate the market but a mixture of wanting to keep production costs down, wanting to offer a choice of models for different kinds of user, and the fact that some features are in direct conflict with each other (such as thinness and camera quality).

No one wants to tap into the "I'll buy all the phones to get all the features" market because that kind of market is tiny and limited to a small number of tech enthusiasts. In the real world most people only buy one phone at a time, and they judge how good a manufacturer is by that phone and that phone alone.

The biggest flaw in the "perfect phone" conspiracy theory is Apple. Apple only makes one phone model at a time, so why are there so many gaps in their phone specs? Why is their camera only 3 megapixels when other makers have 8mp and 12mp models? Why don't they offer a memory card slot? Why isn't there multitasking? Why isn't there flash support in the browser? Other manufacturers have these, why don't Apple? Apple have no other models on the market, so they can't possibly be trying to encourage sales of other models, yet they release a "non-perfect" phone as their one and only model. Why would they release an imperfect phone if a perfect phone was possible?