Okay, the article was a good read - could have been reduced to 2 pages instead of 4 by leaving out the apple pie, glass angels and creme brulee nonsense, but never mind...

My first ever Nokia phone was a 7110 back in 2001. I upgraded to a 6310, then a 6310i, followed by a 6600, a 6680, an N93, an N95-8GB and finally to my current N900, which I still love, despite its little quirks. I bought my eldest daughter a 5200 when she started senior school and my wife a 5800 when my old 6680 that she was using on pay as you go finally got to the point where the screen was too scratched to be readable. It's therefore fair to lump me firmly into the 'Nokia fanboi' category.

My experience as a Nokia customer has been largely good, but tarnished by a number of things, to which I can give some specific examples that have affected me:

1. Poorly thought out hardware design. The 6600 mini-joystick thing was always going to end in tears, being made of a fairly brittle plastic. It doesn't take an engineering genius to see that this could have been replaced by something made in milled aluminium at maybe 1 or 2 euros extra cost to the consumer, in exchange for much greater reliability. The N93 came with a lens cover that clipped on for the first few months but after that fell off immediately you tried to put it back in place. The N95-8G dropped the lens cover that was on the original N95 for no good reason. When the N97 re-introduced it, Nokia spent a fortune trying to rebutt customers claims of poor design leading to lens scratches before finally giving in and replacing them under warranty. And don't even try to get me going on phones which have the charging port at the top and the headphone jack at the bottom...

2. Virtually non-existent software QA. The video editor which was built in to the N93 was so poor that it even crashed on the demo clips that Nokia included on the phone. The 'muvee' feature which was supposed to take a bunch of multimedia files and turn them into a modern day masterpiece would usually fall over when it tried to open the 2nd file.

3. Inexplicable changes in firmware functionality. The 6680 and the N93 call log would show you not only the name of the contact you had called, but also a little icon indicating whether you'd rung the 'home', 'business' or 'mobile' number for that contact. S60 3rd edition changed that from the N95 onwards so that you only had 1 icon for a cellular call which covered all of the above options and a different icon for a VoIP call, a protocol which most mobile telcos banned from their networks, rendering the whole call log pretty much useless and leading to a bunch of 3rd party apps being hurriedly written to provide equivalent functionality.

4. Lack of any kind of 'end user' testing. It took only 24 hours after the release of the N97 before the huge littany of bugs started to be reported, including simple things like UI crashes due to lack of on board memory with more than a couple of apps running. I was so glad that my contract still had 4 months to go and I wasn't able to give in to my impulse to upgrade to the N97.

5. Abandonment in terms of after sales support. The N95-8G is now 3 years old. A software update was released for it earlier this year which will be its last ever by the look of it. No updated OVI navigation is available, so no using my €500 phone in the car for sat nav, although I can do that if I borrow my wifes €300 Nokia 5800. The Wi-Fi stack has a horrendous bug which lets the phone get into a state where it is unable to re-connect to an AP unles you power cycle it (see point 2) and there is apparently no easy way to roll back the update once you've applied it.

My N900 has developed the same USB port problem that others have reported. Considering it's only 9 months old and I'm very paranoid about taking care of my mobile phones, that's pretty poor. It's never been dropped, or exposed to even a drop of rain, I always put it in an empty pocket, where there are no keys or loose change or anything which might sratch it. I'll get it repaired under warranty, although again, the product itself has been abandoned by Nokia and my inner cynic says that it's unlikely that there will ever be a PR1.3 update for it. But I can still play Angry Birds and flip over to an xterm to SSH into a server in our data centre when I'm on call!

I'll never buy an iPhone or anything running Windows mobile - I just can't bring myself to endorse the business practices of either company with my hard earned cash. When my contract is up in March 2011 that leaves either another Nokia, something running Android or something proprietary from one of the smaller manufacturers like LG or Alcatel. Proprietary has never appealed to me. Android seems reasonable, especially with devices like the Desire HD about to hit the shelves, but I'm still not sure if I'll ever be able to write and run a proper Python script on it, although the limited OS access provided at the moment is better than nothing. Which leads me back round the trail to another Nokia. I suspect that the first 2 or 3 Meego devices will be as shot through with bugs as any other Nokia handset released in the past 5 years. Going back to Symbian, as per the N8, the C6-00 and others, would be like throwing away my laptop and going back to a Psion 5mx.

I dunno - I like my Nokias, but maybe it's time I got off the whole "better, faster, shinier" smart phone/internet device/entertainment-in-your-pocket merry go round that we all seem to have blindly jumped on to. After all, I can get a 6680 on fleaBay these days for about €15...