I've thinking to post this here since about a couple of weeks, but never gave me the time to do it. I've commenting this on a couple of forums before but my blog is the most appropriate place to write about it and take it out of my head. I've been a Nokia user for almost 10 years, my first Nokia phone still works to this day so I cannot deny that Nokia makes good hardware, but they are horrible at Customer Service.
After the first N-Gage platform failed, Nokia decided to make a new platform and set it as a Digital Distribution service available to several devices. Since my phone was getting old (a N-Gage QD at the time), I decided to get a N95 8GB and try the new service. I was a little disappointed with the new service because most of the new games weren't like those from the old system, most of them were in fact just like regular mobile Java games with achievements. But the system was good enough and I was expecting the at some point better games could appear. But that was not the case, and eventually the service was phased out and replaced by the OVI store. The communication implied that games from the N-Gage system would be transferred to the OVI store at some point in the future. Eventually and after a year that day arrived, people said farewells in the forums and then the forum was gone for good, however the N-Gage service was still working, you couldn't buy games but you could activate and play those purchased in the past.
During 2010 I tried the Ovi store, and had one bad experience, on April I bought a game that refused to install and had to open a ticket with Nokia Support. They took four months to answer me and solve my problem. FOUR MONTHS! During that time I was really mad with Nokia, they showed me how horrible their support was. How could they compete against Apple or Google if their support is so horrible a simple problem with the store took 4 MONTHS to get fixed, instead of 4 days.
Yet the worst thing happened this year, on March 31st I received a communication that the N-Gage service was closing completely the next day. Since I hadn't reinstalled all the games I owned after the last time I reformatted my phone I tried to activate them back that same day, but it was useless, the service was not working already. Nothing was transferred to the Ovi Store and I had lost access to 21 games I purchased during 2008 and 2009. More than $100 in games that I payed to Nokia to be able to play on my N95 8GB. I was denied access to what I rightfully purchase from them.
I contacted support again, and they took several days to answer, and their answer was:
"A game MUST be bought with a year for support to be given"
Go to hell Nokia, you stole from me, you failed me as service provider, you don't care about your customers, you do not deserve to have customers,.
Well, I finally wrote it. It is out of my head now.