Eric's absolutely right about not being able to touch/hold a phone before buying it. Here in India, no retailer (even the biggest) lets you handle a phone until you have paid for it. That's absolutely ridiculous. They show a dummy model that's similar to the phone. But hey, I want to know how the user interface is, by trying it out. I am very disappointed about that.

I guess no retailer cares. Phones are still selling very well.

In the Uk most shops have working models on display (bolted to a stand)
so you can get a feel for the interface,

(or just to set repeating alarms every five minutes, starting when you've left the store)

It just indicates that Nokia does not consider US its core market. Who in US, except for a few geeks, needs a smartphone, anyway?

But don't you worry, as gasoline rises to $10/gallon, Americans abandon their cars, and the public transportation once again becomes prevalent, everybody will suddenly want a smartphone. An Apple smartphone, of course :)

To quote another famous American, this guy is a MORAN!!1!

San Francisco has a Chinatown, right? Go there, find a reseller, try out the phone, and if you're worried about a grey market model buy online direct from Nokia.com!

I'm surprised AAS would even bother posting this...

Here in Finland, it's completely standard for shops to have the real phones attached to displays for you to try them out before buying them. In larger electronics shops, pretty much every model they sell is available to try, you just walk up and use it, no need to even ask permission.

And that's the problem, everyone does try them, even if they have no intention of buying them.

When I first had a go on the N95 on one of these displays, the slider had been used so much that it was very very loose and wouldn't click shut. It looked extremely battered, and actually put me off even considering that model. It was the same story for flip phones.

The monoblock/candybar models though looked pretty good, and I suppose the lesson here is that the monoblock form factor is by far the most durable.

No, really, Krisse, if you are suggesting petitioning Nokia to stop tethering those poor little phones who suffer in the cruel hands of Finnish consumers, fingering and penetrating them into all their little orifices, maybe you should start with some smaller wildlife first, like squirrels =)

Seriously though, it is pretty much the same in Russia: you can either go to a large electronics store (or Nokia's flagship store in Moscow), or you can visit a cell phone store, or you can just go to some small booth at the electronics market. In all three cases you get to handle the phone before buying it.

The US is different in this sense because in the US, network operators sell you the phone, not manufacturers. Even if you go to some store like CompUSA and buy one of a few phones displayed there, you will be basically buying it from a network operator. And the American network operators are just as bad as European ones, if not worse. The do not care. They do not have to. They are the Phone Company.

Also, where Europeans (or Japanese) usually play with their phones is the public transportation. In the US, everybody is driving, and you can't play with your phone when driving. Hence is a different approach to cell phones: from American point of view, you use a phone to make voice calls. There isn't much space for Nokia smartphones there.

Another thing holding back the mobile phone in America are the awful terms and conditions the network operators impose. Would any Europeans or Asians stand for being charged to RECEIVE calls? They wouldn't, yet that's standard practice in America.

The US network operators also messed up by trying to stop people texting other networks, which completely destroyed the appeal of texting in the first place. The American networks killed the goose that laid the golden egg, while European and Asian networks raked in literally billions of dollars a year from text messages because they DID allow inter-network texting.

What's most telling is if you look at league tables of mobile phone penetration, the US isn't even in the top 20. This isn't even a question of population density, there are plenty of countries (including all of Scandinavia) which have much lower densities and much higher penetration rates.

The net effect of all this is that the US mobile market is far, far less significant than it is in other areas of technology such as PCs or consoles. What happens in the US phone world seems to have very little impact on the rest of the world, and most of the time it's actually American phone users playing catch up with Asian and European phone users.

My advice, buy on in Japan ;-) But yeah, Nokia support is not much use. Luckily in the Netherlands you can test the phone in your hand in a shop!

I understand the frustration on online phone shopping as I used to live in Egypt and I all I do was to walk in a phone store or any of the 10s of Nokia stores in cairo and actually hold all the phones I am interested in, play with them a little bit and decide, if i wasn't looking for specific one.

As for Nokia USA company they are a little annoying sometimes, but here is a nice situation that happened to my roommate: He bought an N73 but it used to drop the network (t-mobile) in spots where he should have full coverage, so he called Nokia tech support they told him to do a firmware upgrade, change his SIM. All without success. 6 months later of having the phone as a paper weight (LITERALY) he deicdes to send it back to Nokia for repair, only to have it shipped back to him with a paper that says in big bold letters "CORROSION IRREPAIRABLE) thats it nothing else. So he calls them up, transfer from one agent to the other blah blah blah for another month, finaly though the told him that he should ship the phone back, and they will instead ship him a brand new N95-3 free of charge for all the hassle they gave him.
So I take it if you are persistent and not get angry with them, you will get rewarded.

keep trying the n95 is simply the best phone available or unavailable :con? had the iphone nice phone simple to use because it does not do that much,and here in the uk you get chrarged £35 for a cable to go through the tv and another £10 to use your own head phones.I think nokia are releasing over 6 phones in the U.S this year so support should get better.

You think $10 a gallon is expensive? Try driving in the uk! Going back to topic though, I have always used utube to get a real look at a phone before buying and whenever I have gone to get an upgrade, I have been allowed to look at all the phones before deciding which one I want. Shame thats not always the way for everyone though :rolleyes:

That's why smartphones are so big in the UK - people do ride buses there :)

I wouldn't call crappy YouTube videos a "real look". Fortunately, there is usually enough high-quality pictures of the new phones on the Net, accompanied with detailed specs. That is enough for a geek, who basically knows what he is going to get, but not for a first time user.

I don't really understand why Eric is so upset.. If he wants to try the Nokia N95 8 GB with European 3G (N95-2). it's readily available from legitimate source all over the Internet - many online stores even have return policies!

There's also a ton of information about the N95-2 all over the web, including pictures and videos - not to mention there are stores in SF where he can probably play with one first, like Orange Commnucations: http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF-8...5537888931447#

Finally, there's WOM world, since he's a blogger :)

It's true that Nokia's retail presence in the US is abysmal. but do you see Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung or LG with a decent retail presence for its unlocked devices in the US?

Eric wants a free N95 from NOKIA.
Maybe he'll receive it, but will the consumer support QoS improve in US?
Probably not just because of a gifted phone...

This is best thing to do therar are oda of things that an N95 has but sadly edit video feature is disabled in laterst firmaware release