Yesterday I broke my Nokia N95 super-phone. Today I packed it up and sent it off to Nokia repairs... in Huntsville. Not the first place I'd think to send a phone to be fixed, but hey, if it was good enough for Werner Von Braun, it's good enough for cell phone repairs.
I hope the experience of getting it fixed is better than than the last one I had when I needed to have a phone repaired. As I realized then, good repair service may seem like one of those things that a company should invest in if it can get around to it, but it actually really matters for today's intimate devices:
A cell phone repair isn't something that requires lots of precision machine work and soldering: you pop open the unit, swap out a circuit board, close it up, and move on. The actual diagnosis/repair/testing cycle probably takes 5-10 minutes (anyone who repairs cell phones and has better numbers, please feel free to comment).
Nonetheless, for whatever reasons it takes months for phones to move through the local store-telco-repair shop ecology. And from talking to other people in the store, it seems that my experience isn't unusual: other, less persistent people have waited for 4-6 months for their phones, and showing up in person to plead for news of their repairs-- like going to the prefecture's office for a visa to leave Casablanca-- now seems to be the norm.
This matters because bad repair service could inhibit the growth of the kind of always-on, pervasive, ubiquitous computing and communications that lots of futurists (and more than a few electronics and cell phone companies) see as just over the horizon. Many people already develop deep, personal relationships with their cell phones; I feel naked if I leave the house without mine. As we invest more in customizing them, and acquire phones that have a larger and larger number of features, bad service is going to feel more and more wrenching, and those loaner phones-- which are always old returns-- will be more and more unsatisfactory.
I hope it's more like my recent experience with Canon, when I got my SD-630 fixed.
Having the camera-- I mean phone... or whatever you call an N95-- out of my life for a few days gives me a chance to reflect on how I've used it.
First, it's not quite a device that can replace all my other devices-- I usually leave the house with a cell phone, camera, and iPod-- but it's a lot closer than I expected.
I've long been skeptical of the concept of the single device that replaces lots of specialized devices. One objection has been about performance quality: cell phone cameras generally aren't as good as cameras, and I've not been willing to make the sacrifice.
Another is that my various devices have different, and contradictory, design parameters. I want a measure of solidness in a camera that I don't need in a cellphone. A cellphone ought to be light, but still stand up to abuse. A camera doesn't have to be heavy, but it should still feel dense and rugged; and the materials and detailing that you use to achieve that aren't appropriate for a phone. And neither cellphone nor camera aesthetics are appropriate for an iPod.
But if I didn't already have these other devices, and wasn't already accustomed to being a little fussy about them, I suspect I'd be perfectly happy with just the N95. The camera isn't quite as good as the SD630, but for most everyday purposes it's really everything I need. Likewise, the MP3 player function isn't quite as good as the iPod, but I can put in enough memory to store a few hundred songs (and, by constructing a smart playlist, choose some songs that I rate highly but haven't played in a while, and songs that I listen to a lot).
Interestingly, I find that performance issues aside, there are things I miss in the N95-- but they're different, depending on whether I'm using it as a camera or an MP3 players. When I'm using it as a camera, I really miss having a wrist strap. (The times I've not used the wrist strap on my camera, I've either dropped it in the ocean, or dropped it on Gloucester Road.) When I'm using it as an MP3 player, I miss the scroll wheel.
The thing I really love, on the other hand, is Lifeblog. Being able to take a picture of something and blog it immediately (or put it on Flickr) is great. Some of the posts admittedly have been a tad frivolous, but I've been able to post pictures to kids opening their advent calendar gifts seconds after they're open. I don't imagine that I've got relatives hitting the "refresh" button every morning; what's good is that it eliminates procrastination and delay on my part. But I expect that the next time I got somewhere that has lots of free wifi spots, I'm going to be photoblogging in more or less real time. I did something like this during my trip to Budapest, but with a phone that can go online, I could really go to town.
[To the tune of John Lennon, "I'm Losing You," from the album "Working Class Hero: The Definitive Lennon (Disc 2)".]
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