I am a ONLY Nokia user , i.e I dont use any other mobile phone apart from a Nokia make. Last year (2004) in September the N-gage QD was launched in the market and I was one of those , who were eagerly waiting. And I bought one in the first month to replace my staid 2100.
The initial experience was real good (features wise it still is great experience to be described as). This phone , no doubt , has so many features budeled for a phone of its cost (the present is around 7500/-) that it underplays many other models from different makes in the market. It has great features. But along my journey of usage ( I am a heavy usage person), I bought a 256 MB MMC and installed about 10 games on my QD ..it had all the stuff .. songs , wallpapers, games and a lot of other utilities like the world clock, MP3 player and the likes. The phone runs on Symbian Operating System and so while I was playing a game and a phone call came , the game would be minimized and the phone highlighted. You can pick the call and then proceed with your game later. This is a cool feature but this has a big downfall. The inbuild memory of the phone should be atleast a 1.5 MB empty , u must not store more then 700 SMS. (Though symbian is supposed to store as many as you want). If while playing a game , u get phone calls and this happens around 7-8 times , or if your empty phone memory is less then 1200 KB and you are playing a game , a very beautiful ’’DATABASE CORRUPT’’ error comes and all applications start failing and ultimately within 2 hrs the phone is dead.
You got to get the OS flashed from Nokia care and there is no other way out for this.This tragedy happened with my phone twice and so I took the caution of storing only songs on my memory card and no games. Apart from this , the phone in long run , at times , corrupts the data in the memory card itself. This happened with me 3 times. You got to format the card and put all the data back from scratch.
If this is not enough, the rubber casing around the phone (I keep the phone in my pocket mostly and am very particular not to misplace it, so inspite of the precaution) swelled and there was a gap in the phone body and the rubber casing. This gap kept on increasing with time..hehe ..so I had to cut the rubber from middle , shorten it by cutting and stick it using Fevistick. The similar thing happened to the opposite side rubber after 3 months and I had to repeat the steps (and to my horror Feviquick seeped into the back battery cover and it held its place real firmly, so I had to use brute force to take it off..hehe;)).
But voice quality wise and features wise I give 5* to the phone. The phone’s range is real cool, there has not been a basement where my phone was not working ...though all my friends had their phones without signal(hats off to the range)But some botherations take me to believe its not so cool after all. I hope Nokia does something good with the N-Series .. I dont want to get my phone OS flashed if a call comes when I am listening to a song..hehe..