Update, May 26 2008

It has been more than 12 days since I originally gave my phone for the repair. The last I heard from the service center was this:

"Sir, the technicians tried to update/install the software again, but the phone is not accepting it. we need to send it to "Higher" service center."

Their higher service center is supposed to be somewhere in Cunningham Road, Bangalore. I have not got any further updates about it from Nokia Care.

Meanwhile, I posted a link to this blog at Nokia Support's website, and they responded. The asked for my phone-numbers, but when I reverted with my phone-numbers, nobody called me. They then sent me another email and asked six questions -

1. Complete address of the Nokia Care Centre
2. IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identifier) /Serial number of the mobile phone
3. Job sheet number
4. Date of submission of the handset
5. Date and place of purchase
6. Case reference number provided by the Nokia Careline representative (if any)

So, even though they know my name, they cannot locate my phone in their IT system using it. Not only that, even though I mentioned about the service center in detail in the previous post, still nobody read it carefully. So, they want me to tell them the "complete (postal) address" of the Nokia Care center. Now, as far as I understand what an IMEI means, it is a globally unique number, so it should be sufficient, but they have asked for Job sheet number, Date of submission of the handset and purchase date, all of which should easily have been available to them by just using the IMEI.

Is this the state of Nokia's service and repair business all over the world? I mean, there is money to be made here, they are not doing a charity. The cost of servicing and repairing (based on expected ratio of such cases) is already factored in by all manufacturers in their products.

Why are they like this - is it because this is India? Will they do the same if they were even selling 10% of the phones in US compared to India?

I have replied to the nokia helpline/service with the details that they asked for, requesting them to return my N95 in full working condition at the earliest. Now its wait and watch.

Software Update - Nokia N95

Nokia is the world's most successful companies when it comes to mobile handsets. So you would expect that their handsets must be truly phenomenal. Nokia sells more than 70 percent of the handsets sold in India. Recently I bought their revolutionary "its what computers have become" handset named N95. It was somewhat of a change for me because I had been using their rock-solid 3330 for more than 7 years without any issues at all.

I bought the 3330 for the equivalent of about an ounce of gold in 2001, and I bought the N95 for the equivalent of an ounce of gold in 2008. Gold is considered to be a safe investment, so it is logical to compare your spends at different points in time with it, because the true value of currency changes due to various reasons. Hey, I am not complaining at all, since the value (or usefulness) of an N95 is much more than a 3330. But, if you look under the battery cover, you will notice that there is a stark difference in build quality. You will still find millions of 3330/3310 around, but I seriously doubt if you will find many N95 in 2015. I guess, we will have to wait and see…

But this is not a comparison of two phones. It is about my expectations with Nokia, what it delivers, and how it has changed. The N95, has been intermittently rebooting and freezing by itself every now and then. It appears that it has some automatic recovery mechanism, so that whenever there is some problem, it fixes by itself; maybe.

But, when I discovered that Nokia has released a software update for the phone then I thought that this is my chance to perhaps fix those issues. After all, Nokia claimed on its website that this upgrade would enhance the battery life by up to 30%, besides enabling me to install newer applications on it, such as n-gage.

Now, I have been writing computer software for quite some time, so naturally I do not get shivers when I have to install new software. Nokia provides an application called “Nokia Software Updater” which you can download from their support website for free. I installed that application and it downloaded another 109 MB to install on my phone. This was an ugly surprise since Nokia website does not mentions anywhere that the NSU application will download additional handset-specific software. My phone’s previous version was 12.0.013, and the update that NSU downloaded was 20.0.015. This appears to be a major upgrade, so naturally I would be thrilled to install it. But when I started the process, it warned that if you yanked the USB cable out during the process then it would basically brick my phone. Now I was not going to do anything like that, but I still joked to my wife that this could happen. But then about 7 minutes into the software install, NSU complained that it cannot detect my phone. I thought wow, what on earth could make NSU think that there was no phone at the end of that USB cable. It could be a bug in the hardware, firmware or the software, I don’t know. When I searched Nokia's discussion forums, and tried to find a solution, I found that there are perhaps thousands of other customers like me who have met with the same fate. Their suggestion was to take the phone to Nokia service center, which goes by the brand name “Nokia Care” in India.

After giving it a few more tries, I decided to take it to Nokia Care. I live in south Bangalore, so I took it to their center in Koramangala, which is a prime retail business hub in Bangalore. The person attending to me did not understand the meaning of “it is not booting”, so I explained to him that I need the software to be reinstalled. He did not know what the heck is software, and what has it got to do with a phone. I was relieved that his task was just to take the phone with a job-sheet to a trained technician, so I surrendered the handset to him, and I wrote the problem in my own words on the job sheet.

I waited for the phone to be returned to me for about an hour, in working condition. But, the service center said that they need to close shop for the day, and asked me to return the next day. They also assured that they would call me to let me know when my phone gets fixed. The next day, I waited for their call, and then I started calling them. I called at least 50 times, and never got through; their only telephone line was always busy.

Then I went to the service center in the evening again, only to be told that the technicians tried to install the software and failed. All my attempts to determine how much the technicians tried, what do they know about phone software, hardware and its problems were in vain. The service center had a closed door policy and they would not divulge anything. Maybe, a rookie handled my phone, I do not know. My request to talk to the technician face-to-face was not accepted, but they conceded that they had no clue about the problem.

I saw many other people who said that they have been coming to the service center for the last 2-3 months to get their phone fixed. What a mess!

Horrible, is all that I can say. I mean, what is this – does Nokia just starts a service center with a bunch of people without equipping them with necessary diagnostic software and skills to determine the exact cause of a problem. They cannot even do a simple software installation on the phone. The phone still shows NOKIA splash-screen indicating that the phone’s firmware and the equivalent of the bootloader is intact.

This just points to one thing – Nokia Doesn’t Care. Yes, it does not care about its customers, anymore since they have an absolute monopoly in this market. This may not last very long, because others are waking up.

If Nokia cared then:

• It would enable its service center with the necessary tools and knowledge to solve customer issues quickly.
• It would put in place a transparent IT infrastructure so that the defect/job could be tracked and escalated by a customer over the web, without having to visit their center again and again.
• It would enable Nokia Care helpline to be able to give answers regarding the state of customer’s service requests.
• Its architects would design the phone’s software in such a way that it would be possible for it to be updated over-the-air in a fool-proof manner.
• If a device failed to start-up due to a failed upgrade then Nokia would take pro-active steps to make sure that the customer’s issue gets resolved quickly. After all, it is possible for the phone to tell Nokia that it is beginning an upgrade.
• It would not expect all handset owners to be running Windows based PCs to install and run the software updater.
• And Finally, it would never ever put out a buggy and insufficient application such as Nokia Software Updater that is known causes so much misery, knowing fully well how much every person depends on his/her phone these days.

This list could go on and on, but I doubt if anyone at Nokia really cares. In the end, I would strongly recommend that you never ever try to update your phone’s operating system by yourself, especially if it is a Nokia.