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Nokia Nobbling Complaints Growing |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Wednesday, 18 April 2007 |
Imagine unpacking you brand new must-have Nokia N95. It's the phone you
always dreamed of light, cool and comfortably fitting in your hand. The
N95 is no phone, says Nokia it's a multimedia computer and you plan to
use every feature it has... GPS, 5MP camera, WiFi, VoIP uh? Hang on...
It is then you discover that your subsidised handset had all the
VoIP capabilities disabled by your carrier and you've just signed
yourself up for a one year contract.
That's just the situation new Vodafone and Orange customers in the
United Kingdom are facing and they aren't happy. IT all started about a
week ago, when mobile VoIP softphone supplier TruPhone exposed the fact
in its blog.
"Some Truphone customers have contacted us with reports that Nokia N95s they've bought under contract from their carriers appear to have internet telephony disabled. This means they cannot use Truphone as they'd hoped," reads the blog
"We're not happy with this. The Nokia N95 is a great
phone and everyone deserves to use it to its full potential. We're
following this up and will keep you updated with news and fixes."
In its blog Truphone advises people to make sure they know what they
are getting before they hand over the phoney (I mean money) for their
handset. Hardly surprising the Brits are getting shafted though, given
that they seem to easily fall prey to cons and triksters? Six of them
have paid 300 quid for a bag of potatoes in the past month alone thinking they were buying a cheap laptop.
Anyway, a week later the story has reached the venerable technology news and gossip site The Register and the readers there are not happy.
"The key point here is you can't sell someone an N95, which is not
actually an N95. I have just preordered an N95 from Orange and they
said it was an N95. I even asked if it supported VoIP? So if I get an N95 that has been nobbled I will send it back and
then I'll probably terminate my contract, so rather than losing a
little revenue off the top, they'll lose a customer that they have had
for 11 years. I am sure I am not alone amongst these operators' customers," says one reader.
TruPhone
is not happy either because it has its mobile VoIP software tightly
integrated with the Nokia platform. In fact it's so unhappy it has even
created a Video
detailing how the functionality is missing from the N95 it bought on
contract from Orange. In the demo it even shows the TruPhone software
apparently installing correctly, but still it's not possible to make a
VoIP call using the phone.
Nokia N95
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