Get an N95, buy AAPL

I recently got the Nokia N95 – and I promptly went out and bought more stock in Apple.

For a flagship product, it’s nothing short of embarrassing. It’s got nice features on paper, but they plain doesn’t work.

The camera has a great lens and great resolution, but it takes literally 5 seconds to get ready for a shoot, by which time your motive is long gone. 5 seconds doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re just idling, waiting for the fucking phone to get its act together, it feels like eons.

The GPS has not yet been able to pick out my position, despite having had plenty of attempts. I was in Barcelona for a week when it was all fresh, and I’d been looking forward to trying the GPS on navigating a foreign city. I could see the maps alright, but the core GPS feature of picking out which spot on that map I was currently on plain never worked for me.

The build quality feels cheap, and the double-slider mechanism is worse than useless. The only thing it does for me is accidentally slide out the wrong way every other time I pull the phone out of my pocket, with the result that the music player, which I neither use nor want, opens up, and I now have to wait another 3-5 seconds before the phone is ready to respond to what I pulled it up for.

I could go on and on, but the harsh reality is that it’s an amazingly poor product. When you add to that the price tag, it’s a disgrace. The iPhone is currently $399 without the plan, while the N95 is double that and up.

And Apple has just gotten started. If you look at how they introduced the iPod, they’re guaranteed to introduce new models pretty fast – new colors, new features, smaller phones, cheaper phones. They’re going to own a huge chunk of the mobile phone market, and who’s going to challenge them? Nokia? SonyEricsson? Samsung? Hardly.