Concerned Fan tried to warn Nokia about impending Doom in 2008

Do you remember the time when cell phones were... well... phones? There wasn't much to know about it: you'd turn it on or off; you'd press the green key to start a call, the red one to stop/cancel one; and that was about it. Of course, soon after they began to have graphoc displays which have been growing ever since, and features and more features that today turned it into powerful computers. But in 2008, a concerned fan wrote Nokia expressing his issues.

After years of owning Nokia cell phones, he finally got one (the E51) where he couldn't do the things he had always done. Simple things like choosing a custom ringtone were hidden under several layers of options; and even writing a text - something you'd expect to be doing a lot every day - now prompted him continuously if it was a text message, multimedia message, etc. It was a very different experience than the one he had navigation his iPod Touch, and clearly... Nokia should do something about it.

Nokia did in fact reply, going as far as scheduling a meeting to explain their vision for the future (what would become the now mostly defunct MeeGo), but the thing is... even Nokia execs news they were in trouble. Off the record one told him that he had exactly the same issues with the current Nokia devices, and that he was one of the first persons at Nokia to try the new iPhone (Nokia had them shipped as soon as they launched in the US).

When his 4 year old daughter got interested, he decided to let her try and play around with the iPhone... which she did effortlessly. (Something that we can now see all over YouTube, with babies and young children easily moving around -some- mobile devices). But it wasn't until later in the evening that the Nokia executive found out the extent of their problems... when his daughter came to him asking if she could have the "magic telephone" to put under her pillow during the night.


That might have been magic... but the really sad part was Nokia not being able to do something about that would ensure they'd still be going strong a few years later. Now... we'll have to see how well they fare under Microsoft's ruling.