Feature

The Worst Phone of 2006

Oh dear, oh dear. We were looking for the phone that generated the most customer complaints, the slow, the half, the lame, the duff, the hardest to shift, the Big Mistake ... 
and what we got from the email vote was a deluge covering around 80 different phones. To simplify things we grouped them by manufacturer.

WINNER or should that be loser
Nokia
Totally unfair, of course, since Nokia has more phones out there than any one and so statistically is likely to accumulate individual moans. But they included “New Nokias are ugly, heavy, expensive, unoriginal and have a new-fangled charger pin ... The 3250 feels so cheap and hollow ... The 6280 is a disaster, every single one of them comes back with a fault ... Every N90 we sold came back with problems ...” Over to you, Nokia.

RUNNERS UP:
Motorola
BenQ Siemens
Samsung

BenQ’s presence here is entirely understandable (“expensive and extinct ... no-one wants them ...”). Samsung gets in – just – with a very modest proportion of the votes cast, when statistically you might expect rather more unhappy users. But Motorola topped the runners-up, clocking up some serious criticisms for the PEBL (“cheap mechanism ... poor build quality”) and yes, the RAZR (“returns rate is massive ... now old and dated, and was never any good to begin with ... if I sell one I know it will be back time after time with countless problems ...”). And as one voter put it, “how many different colours do you want for one phone?”