Slashdot Mirror
N-Gage - Success Claimed, Unofficial Price Drop
Mirkon writes "After non-specific claims of high sales, Nokia's Ilkka Raiskinen has now stated that the Nokia N-Gage's first two weeks have seen massive success, with sales of over 400,000 units worldwide. Analysts are skeptical, firstly because 400,000 is not an exceptionally great amount, and secondly because the number 'refers to models Nokia has sold to shops and other retail outlets', not the amount sold to consumers." Also, drewqmn writes "I noticed on the GameStop website that they are already selling the N-Gage at $199.99 [GamerFeed has a story on this currently unofficial, store-specific price cut, though there are rumors it may be official soon.] Has any console/platform dropped in price so fast?"
Why do corporations insist on these kinds of PR lies when the majority of their target audience can see right through them?
All this does for me is take my opinion from "that's not a good device" to "I'm never going to buy that because the company is totally full of it". What would the reaction be if Nokia played the honesty role, and released a PR statement with an understanding of their poor designs and shortcomings, an announcement of changes to counter the poor decisions, and an open ear to designs and ideas that would benefit a followup device? Would the gaming audience hiss and boo that much? How much would that change the general appearance of the company, and how many people would earn a little more respect for doing what most companies with failed products do?
This is a good opportunity to focus on the differences between the companies themselves, considering that Nintendo did just that. When their handheld product came short of expectations, they admitted their mistakes, turned right around and made a new version of hardware which was received with a majority of positive reactions.
This is a harsh contrast to Nokias consistent lying of ficticious successes in retail.
series60 user interface is the best one i've tried on a 'smartphone' kind of device(which ngage is).
everyone who has used it for more than 2 minutes has liked it(running multiple apps, calendar and dialer for example and tasking between them is easy and tolerable as well). it's much more important in long run that a phones ui is handy than that it is usable from the first second you use it(it's not that hard to navigate).
and nokia has money to burn, they're trying to find business fields for them to dump some of their extra cash they'd like to be in use rather than have it just as cash. they have at least 4 000 000 000$+ they are looking to use on something worthwhile, so using 200 000 000 on a marketing attempt for their not too expensively developed cheapo smartphone isn't that bad. ngage couldn't have cost them too much to develop(it's just an another series60 phone with some added fluff). compared to other series60 phones it's DIRT CHEAP(6600 costs 600$+, ngage 299$, 3650/3660 350$+ and 7650 doesn't have a mmc card slot, so compared to the other phones it's useless).
and let's face it, while the nokias marketing doesn't imply that it is something else than a neat toy, which might be due to them handling too much marketing decision power to americans, it is still so much more than a mere gameboy. gameboy doesn't let you a) read email b) write email c) hang on irc/im d) run custom apps you developed yourself(without extra programmer) e) download other peoples programs and run them. f) browse slashdot g) comment on slashdot.
if you have a pda(with bluetooth) then you might not want it though, if you enjoy buying a piece of crap bt phone for that pda's companion.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Please, no more linking to Penny Arcade. We've all read that one. We've all read any one that you were thinking about linking too as well. We've read Penny Arcade. The links should be modded down as redundant anytime they are posted. Enough already.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.