The Nokia N810 and The Doctrine of Insufficient Adulation

A few weeks ago I was handed Nokia’s new N810 to review. “Great,” I thought, “I quite liked the N800 – the previous version – so let’s see what Nokia has done to improve things.” I lived with it for a few days, carrying it around my home, travelling to and from London with it in my pocket, connecting via Wi-Fi in coffee-shops and using a Bluetooth phone when on over-ground trains. It was fun.

I then submitted my Nokia N810 review. I’d have liked to play with the gadget for longer and written more, but web publishing isn’t good with long deadlines – everyone wants reviews of tomorrow’s products yesterday, or before – and opinion varies on the optimum length for these online assessments. I was commissioned for around 1,000 words, so that’s what I submitted. And then came the backlash...

Now the great thing about web publishing is that the reaction to anything you post is near-instant, both via site comments and pieces published in response on other sites. Some of the site comments posted in response to my review would have you believe that I had it in for the N810 from the start and that I wanted nothing more than to knock it.

This is odd because, on the whole, I liked the N810. Okay, so I judged that it hadn’t moved on much from the N800 and indeed, suggested that in some areas it seemed to have taken a step backwards. But as the N810 was really pretty good, I awarded the gadget four out of six – or about 7 out of ten, if you prefer you numbers that way.

That’s a good score, right? Not nearly good enough, it seems. Soon, people were emailing me to tell me how wrong I’d got it. Over at the Internet Tablet Talk forum, the debated hotted up. My review was variously deemed to be ‘insane’ and ‘lazy’. A few called it ‘fair’ and ‘balanced’, though perhaps they too were insane and lazy to think otherwise.

But forget all that because I want to focus my two favourite brickbats. The first was a suggestion that I’d intentionally damaged the keyboard of my review model N810 (it came about within a day or two of using it) because as an Apple fanboy, I clearly couldn’t stand the thought that the iPhone had a worthy competitor. Because that’s what professional journalists do -- break things we don’t like so that we can criticise them in return for money. This is especially important when the product in question may pose a threat to a rival product from a favoured company. Like Apple. Because I love Apple, remember.

For the record, here’s the list of Apple products I like: iPhone and Exposé. Not much of a list, is it? Here’s a proper list: Mac OS X, Apple TV, iMac, Mac Pro, the MacBook (including the Air -- especially the Air, in fact); the iPod (all varieties) and iTunes. And what’s this a list of? Why all the Apple products I actively hate. If you want the reasons behind this hatred then petition the editor to commission a further piece, because I’d love to annoy the Apple set on another day.

Second, a rather more curious rebuke -- why didn’t I use the device as Nokia intended, rather than slamming it for not doing what I thought it should do? This comment was echoed by other commenters, who whinged that I had barely mentioned the N810’s impressive Linux credentials.

Well, let me clear that up now -- the N810’s Linux credentials are very impressive indeed. In fact, in this respect, right now I don’t think there’s another product of similar size that could touch the N810. I do, of course, stand to be corrected on this point – because I’m lazy and insane – but to my mind, the N810 is one of the best little pocket computers I’ve ever used.

So why didn’t I concentrate on that fact? Because I was using the device as Nokia intends. Don’t believe me? To paraphrase one comment posted in response to my original review, “please learn to use the internet to find more about the way Nokia markets the N810”.

For those too lazy, or just insane, here’s a quick checklist of Nokia’s main marketing points for the N810. Web? Check. Communication? Check. Entertainment? Check? Mapping? Check. Linux? Um, best check that one…

To be fair, the N810 press release does mention Linux. Once, near the end – when, believe me, most journalists will have long since stopped reading. Either way, someone forgot to tell Nokia’s marketing folks about all this fancy Linux stuff the N810 can do. Meanwhile, Nokia’s marketing folks are busy advertising the N810 as a super-duper Web 2.0 and communications device. Which it is. Only it lacks autonomous internet connectivity.

Nokia’s key advertising line for the N810 is “the entire internet in your pocket”. Perhaps they should’ve added: “...so long as you’ve got a Bluetooth phone in your other pocket, or are never further than 100m from a Wi-Fi hotspot”. Not as snappy, admittedly, but a mite more accurate.

Anyway, back to that original review. Several weeks on and my views about the N810 have crystallised. I was right about some things, wrong about others. Yup – I was wrong, folks. You see, four out of six was too generous for the N810 as Nokia markets it. I should’ve marked it 3, or possibly 2. But should Nokia shift its promotional focus to flog the N810 as a pocket Linux box, then it can come back and claim a score of five or six.

JP: I was just about to click ‘publish’ on this piece when I saw an article over at Salon.com headlined “ Why Apple fans hate tech reporters”. It’s an excerpt from a book soon to be published by Farhad Manjoo called True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society about how new communication technology is loosening our grip on objective reality.

In essence, the piece is about the reactionary ‘fanboy’ (not the best term, admittedly) backlash technology journalists face when reviewing products. This particular example is about Apple and a piece Wall Street Journal journalist Walt Mossberg wrote about the (then new) iMac G5.

Despite the overwhelmingly positive nature of the piece, Mossberg was inundated with complaints from Apple zealots about two minor criticisms he made. Mossberg came up with a term to describe the phenomenon -- the Doctrine of Insufficient Adulation. And it’s a pretty good one, too.

As any technology journalist knows, this incident is far from isolated and, obviously, it isn’t unique to Apple products. In fact it simply another facet of perceived press bias and the Salon piece goes on to discuss a study that analysed this very topic in the aftermath of a particularly grisly event in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In short, you can’t please everybody.