I’m glad to see Nokia USA is making some moves toward improvement. That said, it strikes me that so far all of your plans focus on product issues. And that’s missing the point.

I’d like to know what, if anything, Nokia USA plans to do to improve its service for its US customers. Right now, that appears to be your most immediate vulnerability in the US market. Anything you do on the US product front could be undermined or made moot if Nokia continues to offer such inadequate service for US customers.

In a new post to contentious.com (http://urltea.com/35t6), I reiterate 2 measures that could immediately help rescue Nokia’s reputation on the service front, and encourage more mobloggers, journalists, and other high-end consumers to purchase and use (and blog about) your N-Series devices:

1)TIMELINESS. All repairs and replacements will be handled within seven days, including shipping. Don’t make us wait a month or more to get our phones back, as is now the case.

2) RESPONSIBILITY. All phones damaged by Nokia’s firmware update process (which Nokia has acknowledged is flawed and has damaged phones) will be replaced for free, no questions asked, within seven days.

…Again, those are just suggestions. But they seem to me to be more practical and helpful NOW than what Nokia USA has proposed so far.

What exactly is Nokia USA planning to do to improve its US service? How fast can you act on that? If there are barriers to those improvements, what are they? Many current would-be Nokia N-Series have a strong incentive to help you solve those problems. Please bring us into that process. We want you to succeed in this market.

- Amy Gahran

Not only is stuff coming through the carriers–no surprise there–but Nokia products are starting to be increasingly present in more retail outlets.

One of the reasons Nokia is so successful as a handset maker is the number of different phones that appeal to a wide range of consumers. One person’s “product spam” is another person’s “useful product.”

What manufacturer *doesn’t* spam the U.S. market with phones? How many different Samsungs, LGs, and Motorolas are on the shelf of not just AT&T, but Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile? And most of them are the same guts, just a different form factor, or a small difference.

I for one would be happy to see Nokia step it up in the U.S., specifically with the S60 products. I’m not asking for N95s on every corner. There are *several* low- to mid-level S60 handsets that would do well on the U.S. carriers. Heck, even the N73 would sell like gangbusters, and it’s how old?

In a way they are right. Flooding the market with phone no one wants won’t help. But if the flood of phones is really the backlog of non-US phones that don’t seem to ever make it to the US, then we’re talking honey ham.

Let’s hope this isn’t a ‘throw it all at the wall and let’s see what sticks’.

Any other thoughts on this?

Regarding updates – Yeah, I’ve noticed that some folks seem to never get them since they are tied to an operator variant. I see it in Europe too. But I have no idea how to overcome this. I think it’s really up to the operators to decide when their variants have an update.

And thanks for visiting.