When's the E61i coming out, Mr Three?

A colleague of mine was entertaining me me with his experience in a Three store recently.

“When is the Nokia E61i coming out?” he asked
“The whaaa?” responded the Three customer representative
“The, er, the next version of the E61?” he prompted

Glased look, then look of momentary recognition

“Dunno, never heard of it…”

—

It’s not what you want to hear, is it? My colleague reckoned that this lack of knowledge and awareness didn’t quite add up with Three’s apparently ultra hip, X-Series style image. While I agree, a little bit, I also think that we’re all far too geeky to be bothering shop assistants with this kind of information.

I don’t know. Either every assistant should be given a series of launch dates for every major handset so they can answer these sort of questions reliably……. or the operator themselves should post up properly maintained ‘coming soon’ sections WITH dates or rough dates, to prevent us geeks from exposing our ultra geekness to unsuspecting sales people.