Back in November I had the pleasure of attending the Nokia N82 product launch with several other bloggers. We all got a chance to meet one of the Product Managers who worked on the Nokia N82, Tomoharu Yazawa [23 minute video interview]. He was, without a doubt, one of the coolest cats in the room, answering all of our questions without any hesitation all while sounding highly enthusiastic, professional and down to earth. If I could have changed anything from that day I would wish he could have joined us for dinner and a few drinks.
I want to let you guys in on a little secret, well it isn’t really a secret, but many of you will be surprised to know that I never actually purchased an Nseries device, ever. The Nseries brand turned 3 years old on April 27, but for a majority of those 3 years I was a Series 40 fan. The devices not only looked better, my personal opinion, but they were vastly cheaper. For a college student with no job that made a huge difference.
During the summer of 2006, after selling off a few of the digital toys I had stopped playing with and doing a quick job here and there, I had enough money to spend on the first device that would introduce me to the world of S60, a Nokia E61. I liked it so much that I started blogging in the fall and the hard work I was pouring into Ring Nokia made WOM World notice; they started providing plenty of other devices for me to test, 2 weeks at a time of course.
Last year when I moved to Finland the Nseries Digital Marketing team couldn’t believe how crazy I was to actually pull a stunt like that, so they gave me a Nokia N95 as a present and it served me extraordinarily well. The GPS helped me navigate around a foreign land and the camera was brilliant for taking pictures to show my friends back home what this strange new country they couldn’t find on a map looked like. On November 14 2007 the Nokia N82 launched and I was one of the first people to get a review unit [N82 Review]. I remember telling Tomo (that’s what we called him) how awesome this device would look like in Black, he said he’ll take the idea into consideration, but made no promises. In December at Nokia World in Amsterdam and I bumped into Tomo again, this time with a new larger batch of bloggers at either side of me, and we all pounded the drum asking for a Black version, no promises were made, but he could tell how badly we wanted one.
Fast forward to today, Fedex woke me up at 9 in the morning to deliver a Black Nokia N82. This is the first Nseries device I have spent my own actual money on and it is just as beautiful as I was expecting it to be. Now I know someone is going to say “Ummm, you have a Silver Nokia N82, why did you buy a Black Nokia N82?”
The answer to that question is that there is no other way to show how much you enjoy a product than by paying for it, the same applies to music, art, anything really. This is my way of saying thank you to Tomo for not only listening to my suggestion, I’m positive I wasn’t the first to suggest Black, but for creating a mobile phone that I can actually tell people I love owning and using on a daily basis.
Domo arigato.
Picture of my baby after the jump.
Oh and since I know a lot of you will ask, differences between the Silver and Black: The soft keys (Left, Right, Symbian and C) are not mushy, but instead very clicky in a good way. The dpad is also higher (aka more raised) and not as mushy, but still not as clicky as the soft keys.