I always find it amusing when a company tries to hide its problems, so I had a good laugh yesterday when I finally decided to do something about my Nokia N73.

Don’t get me wrong; this is an amazing phone. 3.2 megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss lens; automatic picture upload to your Flickr online photo album; miniSD support. But it had one obvious and really, really, really annoying fault. Every time I sent a text message, my phone would freeze for at least 30 seconds before I could use it again. The worst thing was that I would have to wait 30 seconds for the message to even begin to send. And of course, I’d have to wait to lock the phone before putting the phone back in my pocket. Imagine trying to send a quick text before jumping on the tube–”Just getting on the tube now… see you in 10″–only to realise you have to wait outside the station staring into space, like a man struck with a sudden bout of amnesia, not knowing whether you are coming or going.

Anyway. My point was that I decided to be proactive and went on the hunt for a software upgrade. Lo and behold, I found the SMS Accelerator via the Nokia N73 minisite. Nokia describe it thusly:

This application accelerates the sending of SMS messages. It is recommended that you install this application to prevent slowness in SMS sending, which may occur over time if you send lots of SMS messages.

Slowness? SLOWNESS? It’s a product fault. A priority one. I mean, seriously - you could at least try to make a big deal out of it. People are having trouble with this everywhere. (One person mentioned not receiving messages until the phone was restarted. That’s a different bug, when the Messaging app crashes and doesn’t automatically restart.)

Very telling was the Nokia tester on Symbian Freak who said:

1. They dont seem to take any note of the fault reports as I … reported the sms slow down issue {it never got sorted till this release} …

2. The testing period is quite short… out of all the phones I have tested the longest was for the N70 which was around 3mths!

It’s shocking how companies with such a large market share can be so careless. The faults I have experienced with my N73 have had me almost go back to my ageing Samsung D500 (which, by the way, is a fantasticly stable phone).

Get your act together, Nokia!