the n series by nokia got me a little worked up/hyper on wednesday when i first read about it. the centrepiece of the series is the n91; it looks good, has a built in 4gb hard drive along with endless other features and is being tipped by some people to be an “ipod killer“, all thats very well and good.. but the one thing that gets me is that the phone wont be released until the end of the year! the length of time between the unveiling and the shipping should be as short as possible, by the time its released it will be just another one in a crowd of mobile phones with hard discs built in.

i am sure that the engineers are working away to get the prodict finished and ready for mass production in time for the fourth quarter of the year, but why are we hearing about it now?. whenever a product is unveiled there is always a lot of people talking about it, its new features, the way it affects the current marketplace due to its features and so on, but the problem i have with this phone is that by the time it is actually introduced the market and the world around it will have moved on.

in comparison with nokias style of unveiling products is that of apple. they announce on a monday and sell on the tuesday, thereby taking advantage of the instant hype that their unveiling generates. “here is our new blah blah” shouts steve jobs “… you can buy it tomorrow in apple.com or in your local apple store”. in (perhaps an unfair) comparison to that of this n series phone “here it is! … you can buy it somewhere in the last three months of this year in a local phone shop, that is of course depending on your location in the world, oh and just before we start to sell this phone, we will unveil a new even better phone that will go on sale in the q3 2006”.

i still want one though 🙂 now i have lots of time to start saving!