The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH). Australia’s equivalent of the new york times has just posted the most biased review of a mobile phone I have ever seen. The review is of Nokia’s N97, Nokia’s flagship touch screen phone and the second Nokia device to take on the iPhone directly. The first being the 5800 XpressMusic.
This article is nothing but pure garbage written either by a rabid Apple fanboy or, more likely, by a company that receives a great deal of money from Apple to promote the iPhone. In fact, if you have taken any notice of SMH’s technology section you’ll see they have been featuring at least one or two ‘articles’ a day that can only be considered as iPhone advertorial.
This article will pick their anti-Nokia advertorial that has been thinly disguised as a review apart and show the true light of what they are doing. As for Nokia – I hope someone sees this and puts their money where their mouth is and withdraws any advertising spend they had with the SMH for this blatant cash for bad comments review.
One final note before I dive head long into this opinion piece. I know some you may say this site is biased. That may be true but at least it’s made very clear. This site is about the iPhone’s deficiencies and everything I and others hate about them. The SMH and many other clearly biased news agencies say that they still hold up to some sort of journalists code of ethics. They don’t. Don’t listen.
I will quote various parts of the story and follow up with a rebuttal.
Build Them Up
“Symbian is the name of the OS that powers most mobile phones in use today. That’s largely because it’s Nokia’s OS of choice and Nokia is the maker of the world’s most widely-used mobile phones.”
“Symbian is not only the most widely used mobile phone OS, it also accounts for about half of the smartphone segment of that market – the one that includes Apple’s iPhone and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry.”
Wow! So since this phone runs Symbian it must be really good. After all we buy more Symbian based phones than any other phone. McDonalds didn’t get big because people didn’t like the their hamburgers and same with Nokia.
Tech Specs
“The phone itself ticks off most of specs you’d like to find in a modern smartphone: 5 megapixel camera (with zoom and flash), video, removable battery, a big 3.5-inch touchscreen and a physical keyboard.
Plus it has 32GB of internal memory that can be topped up with another 16GB of external memory using the microSD memory card.
That’s basically everything the iPhone is criticised for not having: physical keyboard, replaceable battery, expandable memory, non-proprietary cables and more megapixels.”
So in summary it’s in every way better than the iphone? What’s your problem with it?
Knock Em Down
“But maybe not for much longer. Despite the huge headstart, the Nokia/Symbian share of that lucrative end of the market is a shrinking one.”
Completely unsubstantiated so initially I let this one fly. As I read on, I found out this was pretty much the theme of this article. Unsubstantiated pokes at the iPhones latest competitor in the touch screen phone market.
“I found the set-up process equally frustrating and non-intuitive, beginning with the flimsy back panel that you have to pry off to insert the SIM card and the battery.”
This is what you have to do with every phone you idiot. Only difference with the iPhone is you can’t change the battery, even if you want to.
“The camera also disappoints. I was expecting the 5-megapixel camera with the Carl Zeiss lens to deliver much more. Instead, I found the image quality to be flat and unreliable.”
Why the whinge? It’s better than your iphone. Also there’s no mention of the flash. While the author seems to be obsessed with the iphone they curiously leave out the features that make the n97 superior to the iphone. Everyone else in the world is saying how much better the n97 camera is than the iphone 3GS. Why does this author just attack it?
The author then goes on to attack the Nokia App Store which while late to the game is still a good catchup by Nokia.
“But, once again, Nokia hasn’t delivered. Two of the apps, the Opera browser and a newsreader for The Guardian newspaper, failed to download and my request for help via the Ovi Store was left unanswered.”
Just because the author had trouble downloading a file, most likely due to network connectivity problems from his all metal garbage skip that he obviously lives in doesn’t mean everyone else does. Opera is a fine app that brought the desktop web experience to the mobile phone long before the iphone was even a glimmer in Steve Jobs’ eye. Don’t diss it or the Ovi Store because you’ve had problems.
The Conclusion
This is it. The most underwhelming and made up conclusion ever.
“All in all, I found the N97 to be underwhelming and not nearly good enough to dent the iPhone, let alone kill it.”
Why is it underwhelming? You just said it beats the iPhone in every technical aspect. What’s wrong with the usability?
Why would it need to dent the iphone? Nokia already kills them in sales?
Why did you bother writing this review? It’s full of biased crap even though you admitted it’s a technically better phone than the iPhone why is it not as good?
In Summary
This SMH article is just one of many that have either been fueled by the iPhone fanboys’ fear of the fact that there are better phones out there, or worse, blatant advertorial paid for by the Apple marketing machine. Here’s some more examples of reviews that are not backed up by evidence or show clear bias:
- Nokia N97 – So close yet so very far – with almost 100 comments, most scathing of the review this one is a prime example of biased reviews
- Nokia N97 – Nokia is Doomed – funny, an overral positive review but we are still left with the sticky title
For a device that does so much more than the iPhone it’s receiving a disproportionate amount of flack.
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DAMN STRAIGHT!
Someone should actually do some serious research to find out how much money Apple is actually using for this kind of activity. The biggest blogs at least get a lot of benefits from bashing the competition, no question about it.
“If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.” -Joseph Goebbels
I think you need to attend English classes before pretending to be an authority on biased journalism. Your piece is riddled with embarrassing spelling and grammar errors.
That aside, from a software perspective, the Nokia N97 is simply inferior to the iPhone, which is the point that the SMH author was trying to convey, but failed miserably.
Hehe it’s so funny when the only thing someone can find to pick on about someone else is their spelling. I guess correct grammar and spelling is more important then facts in that persons eye which only show us one thing… They don’t care to much facts
+1 to Generic Person
This piece is pure opinion, and you are not an unbiased source yourself. You can throw all the technical crap in a phone you want, but in the end the user needs it to work quickly and effectively. It’s exactly what the article specifically says the N97 DOESN’T DO. The interface is not intuitive, and he says that the quality of the 5MP sensor is flat. I’d rather have a sharp 3MP picture (iPhone) than a blurry 5MP one. Megapixels don’t matter at the end of the day.
“all metal garbage skip that he obviously lives in” – You, sir, have absolutely no grounds to base this on. You made it up, pure and simple. And it IS something to consider if downloads fail on the device, whether you deem it important or not. Also, ‘network connectivity problems’ don’t explain why his support ticket was never answered.
You conveniently leave out that the iPhone 3GS is capable of much faster 3G speeds as well.
You can find bias in anything if you are looking for it.
It seems that the same newspaper is at it again in their review of the 5800 xpressmusic.
The author has a whinge about the fact they can’t use a computer but blames it on the Nokia software then goes on to compare the phone to an iphone and say overall the phone is pretty mediocre – despite the fact the specs on the phone are up there with any other smart phone.
Read on for another biased review from the SMH.
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/mobiles/review-nokia-5800-xpressmusic-20090720-dqd0.html