On several occasions I've had feature phones built by nokia, including one I just happened to pick up a few weeks ago.
I find that the UIs have become less intuitive and ever more maddening over the years, with the latest one being a good example.
Build quality is fine for a plastic phone. Screen resulution- well it is a feature phone. But look of the UI is poor, and the discoverability of the UI is extremely poor.
All that said, you may well be right - they may still be a leader for the feature phone market, and thus that means the others are much worse.
If you read jacquesm's blog post, he mentions the Nokia 2110.
That thing was an F-in' beast. I had friends in high school who wanted their parents to buy them new phones try to destroy Nokia 2110's (or maybe it was one of the later Nokia bricks) and just fail. You wash it? No problem. You throw it down the stairs? No problem. You run it over with a car, no problem.
With my Android phone, which frequently and bafflingly fails to function (randomly changes ring tones, stops receiving incoming calls, battery life drops under 10 minutes) I look back fondly on the days of the indestructible Nokia 2110.
It's been a while since I bought a Nokia phone, but if they put out an ad that said: "Remember this?", followed by someone running a 2110 over with a car and making a call, "Well check this out!", followed by someone running a Nokia WP7 phone over with a car and checking their e-mail, I would buy the shit out of that phone.
Anyways, not really insightful, just the brand impression that Nokia has on this consumer.
I find that the UIs have become less intuitive and ever more maddening over the years, with the latest one being a good example.
Build quality is fine for a plastic phone. Screen resulution- well it is a feature phone. But look of the UI is poor, and the discoverability of the UI is extremely poor.
All that said, you may well be right - they may still be a leader for the feature phone market, and thus that means the others are much worse.