December 2nd the box arrived, IIRC. Release for Romania was scheduled for Dec 15th, but hey, when you have people with 600-1200E burning a hole in their pocket, things have a way of working themselves out. And yes, I got it legally, box and invoice. No, there isn't a mugged German in Koln still crying himself to sleep.

The fruit annoys me to no end, I generally dislike user bases that claim to be completely superior. Nothing is completely superior to anything else. I can't use an iPhone to nail a picture to the wall. So, the rock wins.

However, I always admired the fact that they understood the basics perfectly, it's like they actually read those development guidelines. Backwards compatible, at least one standard that Just Works natively, uniform UI, generally finished work.

Technically? Illegal in all countries that's not English-speaking. Also, under-age. Also, unsigned, non-agreed-by-both-parties agreement. Also, unsigned. So, probably so. At least here, scribbling stuff on a box doesn't even amount to verbal agreement. My box was delivered, and contained in a black plastic bag.

Will that change anything? No. "Legal" doesn't count until sued. Who here will sue Nokia Corp over an SMS? Well? There you go.

From Nokia's Privacy Policy:

"We collect your personal data typically when you make a purchase, use or register into our services, enter into a sales promotion or a campaign or otherwise interact with us. We endeavor to collect personal data only with your knowledge or consent. Below are examples of the categories of data collected"

Hmmmm. I suppose that since they said "We're sending an sms" they covered the "Knowledge" part. But consent, not so much.

Perphas we can call it. "Agressive Practices". Since in essence, if I don't agree to this, I cannot use the device, right? Aggressive Practices are illegal in EU consumer protection Laws.
http://ec.europa.eu/consumers/citize...mm_prac_en.htm

I would tend to think that their definition of legal is:

A single person couldn't afford the lawsuit, and we have deemed the chance that our customers would file a class action lawsuit (or be able to afford it / get it together / etc) so low that we aren't worried about it. Therefore, since we aren't worried about it being challenged, we'll call it "legal".

Well, here's for you people who have a different box or don't have perfect eyesight as required by Nokia's legal:


The image should be at 10 MPx (but Picasa smooshed it). Minor editing with a trial software was used to enhance contrast. No changes to content.

Well that's it then. They are right and we were wrong. Shame on us.

I'll be caught dead before recommending a Nokia handset to anyone. ever. N-who?

But then again. what difference can i make.

How hard was it really. to do something like this? How lazy can they get with the n900? It's ridiculous:



Yup keep giving love to them Cs and #### since they're the pride of your market share. Just pull out of the hign-end then and get it over with

There's several aspects top this issue. One of them is if what's printed on the box (in a foreign language, hidden under the carrier's custom box, making a reference to Ovi instead of MyNokia and claiming that you'll need to register, not that the device itself will "register") is enough to make all of this legal. - I doubt it, but it'll come down to who pays more for the lawyers.

The other issue is a matter of trust and the image it creates. One of the assets Nokia had was that they did not, as Apple or Google, enforce anything on their customer's devices. That was true for Nokia, but even more so for Maemo devices.

They threw that asset away for nothing. There's nobody who benefits from these MyNokia messages. (Except the carriers maybe.) Consumers get wrong information and are pointed to non-existent websites, and Nokia probably doesn't gather information that's really useful either. So why do it? And even worse, why be so stubborn to continue with this farce, making up annoyingly embarrassing things like "The device is a mobile computer because it can take pictures, therefore you need to receive our text messages"? What???

It's the issue of trust, of who owns my device and who controls it that's important to me. Even if 100 Nokia-lawyers tell me it's legal what they do: That won't re-earn them my trust. From now on, it seems we'll have to hack our own devices so that we can really own them.

What was it I was trying to say with this post? Oh... don't let them involve you in legal battles. It doesn't matter if it's legal. All that matters is if it's right.

I'm not ranting on behalf of the council here; this is solely my opinion as an N900 user, electronics geek and consumer advocate.

I'm with benny1967. And I'm frankly tired of companies in general hiding behind legal boilerplate and asserting, "look, we're covered, so we did nothing wrong."

What makes a functional society are the little things we do that go above and beyond legal allowances. Goodwill in this case means protecting the customer from legalese and providing a delightful, not just tolerable, experience.

The kneejerk boilerplate defense has been a growing thorn in my side and I'm not going to go silent on it. Nokia has heard about it and they'll hear more until someone either GETS IT or I/we give up in frustration.

And I'm a pretty stubborn you-know-what.

As a Nokia employee I fought hard internally for customer quality with some successes (believe it or not, the N800 was one) and some failures. That's simply because I loved the company culture and products and realized Nokia has so much potential that they waste by getting stuck on the letter of the law. Either this is fixed at the executive level, or they realize in a few years just how stupidly they handed over success to competitors.

/rant

They (sneakily?) don't log the outgoing SMSes in the normal database accessible via Conversations on the device. But if your carrier gives you web access to an SMS log you can see it there.

This thread would violate the proposed t.m.o policy:
Lucky that the policy is not in force yet.

My box doesn't show this at all. There's nothing about SMS.