It’s been a seemingly long time since Nokia was viewed favourably in both the public and the tech world. The company has been long revered for its hardware and the incorporation of certain technologies in its device – such as FM Transmitters, USB OTG, HDMI output and so on – but it is also on the receiving end of negative reviews largely on the software side of things.
This looks to be in reverse now though, with Nokia winning awards for the design of the N9, and awards for the Lumia 900. Earlier this week was Mobile World Congress (MWC), which saw the unveiling of the incredible 808 device and yet another award for the Finnish handset maker. The 808 PureView landed the company the award for Best New Mobile Handset, Device or Tablet at Mobile World Congress, and the judging panel consisted of analysts and leading journalists, making it an especially important award – it is, after all, these same groups of people that have been Nokia’s strongest critics in recent years.
The award itself is justified, and aside from the write-up of the 808 on this site you can learn about the technology running the phone from Nokia’s imaging expert Damian Dinning. Nokia’s Jo Harlow explained the importance of the award: “It’s a fantastic award because it signifies that consumer experience counts. It’s about tech, but it’s about how tech is used to make a consumer have a fantastic experience…These are first signals that we are executing against our strategy. That we’re back. That we’re bringing great products to our consumers – and that this is just the beginning.”
The first part of the quote is entirely true – it isn’t just about having an impressive sheet of specs, a quad-core phone still seems entirely pointless, but it’s about the core user experience when using the device that’s important, making it function in such a way that users want to pick it up, and more importantly know how to use it in certain situations, from travel to photography to social interaction. As for the second part of the quote, that signifies Nokia has at last truly begun to understand the situation it finds itself in and is putting its efforts into turning things around – so let’s hope we can expect more of the great pioneering that turned it into the biggest phone manufacturer in the world.