Nokia and Music have never, ever got on

I was walking back from breakfast this morning getting more and more annoyed. I headed straight to my desk to write. Cue a rant.

I can’t tell you how incensed I was when I handed my Apple iPhone to my mother, who, within 30 seconds, had learnt the user interface and was merrily playing music, taking, organising and showing off photos and trying to make phone calls (although the SIM isn’t functional yet).

It really, really annoyed me.

How come she was so able to understand the interface so quickly? How come she wanted one? What?

What’s happening? What’s going on? It took us nearly 6 months to get her to reliably learn to use her RAZR. We tried with a Nokia, but seriously, that was even more challenging.

The source of my anger is that Nokia, billion, billion dollar company that it is, keeps on vomiting out absolute rubbish.

You and I — that is, mobile smarts — get it. We lap up the 5 megapixel cameras. We delight in the ability to install third party apps on to the handset and so on.

Meantime Apple comes along and blows every other handset manufacturer away.

It’s all about the interface, stupid.

And with the latest news that Nokia is shortly to vomit out a music store in a searingly pathetic attempt to make up for the shit, shit, shit MP3 shite music players that it’s been foisting on us for years… I can’t even be bothered to link to the news.

I’m a huge technical geek, yes? I have a 2 gig card in my Nokia N95. I used Nokia’s Apple Mac sync thing, (again, I’m annoyed so I can’t be arsed to find the proper name), to transfer music to my device.

Which I did.

But it didn’t quite work. I mean, the music, some music, transferred. But when I got to my Nokia, it took about 10 seconds to load up the music player (to find the tracks). Only then did I hunt around looking for the playlists…….. which were nowhere to be found.

That’s just a piece of shit.

Piece of rubbish.

You can’t be vomiting out this sort of inept crap when Apple are hawking their beautifully designed, 100% ‘syncable’ iPhone that, shock horror, just works.

For months I’ve been doing the Emperor’s New Clothes thing with the N95 — and, in fact, any Nokia. I’ve found myself wondering why I even bother. A multimedia computer? Yes. It’s a sad indication that it’s ‘what computers have become’ though. The music is shit.

It’s always been shit. In fact it’s been shitter — they’ve made it a little better.

Music certainly isn’t the be-all, end-all. But music is a key component to one’s digital lifestyle. That’s why Apple sold ALLLLL those iPods. That’s why you, me and everyone else on the planet carries their perfectly-capable Nokia MP3 player AND their iPod.

Because the Nokia handset’s music functions, despite what the brainboxes in Finland have tried to deliver, is massively, massively substandard. We’re still in the 1990s with Nokia and music.

Will their latest attempt at going multimedia with their new Nokia Music Store get anywhere? Well, the jury is surely out. I won’t be holding my breath. I’m very open to a claw-back. I’d like to see Nokia succeed and I will be the first one to congratulate any triumph that they can deliver. I just won’t hold my breath.