I pre-ordered a Nokia 5630 XpressMusic (S60) in April 2009 and recieved it late May.
It was awesome! Great camera-recording, WiFi, 3.5mm audio plug, good looking, slim. Maybe not a competitor to the iPhone 3g but I felt it was on par with Android devices at the time, and available at only ~260€ without contract.
This feeling lasted for 5 minutes, then it crashed. And it crashed again. And again. 20-30 times that night as I tried different features, before I just gave up. I started to regret my purchase.
It got better over the following year with updates but it never fully stopped to crash. Often it would crash while playing music, which really sucks for a phone sold to me as THE music smartphone. By June 2010 I had switched to a HTC Desire (which I'm still happy with, now with a custom ROM).
It is interesting to read in this post-mortem that 'Testability' was really hard on Symbian, and that problems or bad choices on how e.g. email polling should work, that must have been caught by engineering, somehow slipped through the cracks into the hands of customers.
If testability had been easy and quality the highest prio at Nokia, then the 5630 could have been the phone I still use, and I would have recommended it to friends back then instead of saying 'Stay clear!'. I might even have considered buying another Nokia phone. Things could have been different.
It was awesome! Great camera-recording, WiFi, 3.5mm audio plug, good looking, slim. Maybe not a competitor to the iPhone 3g but I felt it was on par with Android devices at the time, and available at only ~260€ without contract.
This feeling lasted for 5 minutes, then it crashed. And it crashed again. And again. 20-30 times that night as I tried different features, before I just gave up. I started to regret my purchase.
It got better over the following year with updates but it never fully stopped to crash. Often it would crash while playing music, which really sucks for a phone sold to me as THE music smartphone. By June 2010 I had switched to a HTC Desire (which I'm still happy with, now with a custom ROM).
It is interesting to read in this post-mortem that 'Testability' was really hard on Symbian, and that problems or bad choices on how e.g. email polling should work, that must have been caught by engineering, somehow slipped through the cracks into the hands of customers.
If testability had been easy and quality the highest prio at Nokia, then the 5630 could have been the phone I still use, and I would have recommended it to friends back then instead of saying 'Stay clear!'. I might even have considered buying another Nokia phone. Things could have been different.