Nokia Business Phones – A Joke!

Recently when my Blackberry phone became useless after dropping  it accidently, I started looking for another business phone. Blackberry is an excellent business phone, but bigger in size and thus difficult to handle. This time I looked for a sleeker phone. My basic requirement is access to mails on the go and a decent battery life.

As I looked around, Nokia E71 and E63 seemed obvious choices. They had all the functions I was looking for. Bluetooth, VoIP,  Mail for Exchange, a nice design and a user friendly key board. Finally settled for E63 as it was seven grand cheaper than the E71 and only noticeable difference was E71 supports integrated GPS which eventually I did not require.

With a brand new E63, I started setting up my phone. I use a corporate mail exchange server for my emails. I tried setting up the Mail for Exchange application but it won’t synchronies my emails with the Outlook. I un-installed and then re-installed many times, went through the user manuals again and again but could not make my email work. Finally exhausted after 2 days, started searching the support forum on Nokia site. It was shocking going through the site and seeing the number of complaints about Nokia’s business phones. Rued, why I did not visit these forums earlier when I was searching for information on phones.

First thing, I found on the forums the software needs to be updated. Now this is quite fundamental and should be mentioned on the user manual itself. Software updates happen regularly and by the time a phone reaches a consumer the software on phone is many notches down than the current version. I set up my phone for the updates, which was about 110 MB. So the one on my phone was quite obsolete.

Tried setting up my mails again but it won’t start. I went through almost thousands of questions posted on support but could not find a work around for Mail for Exchange issue. Most disturbing part I found on these forums was hardly any response from Nokia. It is mostly users trying helping each other.

Another email application called Nokia Wireless Email works fine and I can access my Gmail and Google Apps mails easily. It is the corporate email for which I bought this phone is troubling me. Earlier Nokia business phones used to have an application called Blackberry Connect where accessing corporate emails was a charm. Now probably due to business rivalry, Nokia stopped this application and instead offers Mail for Exchange which seems pretty useless.

My deepest appreciation to Nokia for not documenting half the processes. Thank you for forcing me to discover these.  It is really fun to pay Rs. 11,500 for a business phone and spending nights after night on finding out its basic services. Nokia should stay away from business phones as it is releasing phones with sub-standard software and no real support. No point competing with Blackberry and IPhone. Nokia’s business phone line is a joke!!