I've been a Nextel user since the 90s. It actually happened somewhat against my will when my father, always eager to try new gadgets, discovered Netel's walkie talkie feature. This basically meant that his overbearing voice could come out of my phone at any time, although I quickly learned how to use the silent feature. When I bought my first Nextel I hated the phone, it was large, ugly and no one had ever heard of it. That was soon to change. It seemed like overnight, Nextel spread like wild fire through westchester and the bronx, to the point that 'hit me up on your two-way' became a househols saying. And at first, Nextel seemed quite able to meet the demands of its growing subscriber base. They were continously adding new features and functionality, changing their phones to meet a younger and more demanding client base and expanding there network extensively, I can still remember the days when a road trip would take me to some out-of-way-no-where-land and the only phone that had service was mine. It seemed to be a revolution at the time, with my friends and I looking down on non-nextel users thinking, 'these people are just not in the know'. But then, something happened.
I'm not familiar enough with the history of Nextel's corporate game plan to know for sure, but it seems that they spent an enormous amount of time, money and marketing to promote what they thought would be the next big thing, 'the nationwide network'. This feature would allow me in my home in new york to two-way someone across the country in LA.....and it worked. I remember distinctly the first day it came out because my father and his brother from Texas were playing around with it all day long. Unfortunately, as cool as this was for current Nextel users who had friends and family living far away, I think this was their first, although not only, huge miscalculation. Firstly, they failed to realize that many people used the two-way feature to get in touch with friends living within a close geographical distance whom they saw on a daily basis, rather then as a substitute for a phone call. Second, and most importantly, the effort exerted attempting to create this feature left them way behind in the race to create capable media enabled phones. My phone, an i860, which came out roughly over a year ago and was the first Nextel camera phone I owned, takes completely horrible pictures and won't even let me send video. And as I became more interested in these features, along with many other consumers, I grew to dislike my poor Nextel more and more, a trend that seems to have disseminated across a large portion of my friendship circle as many people I know who once swore by Nextel have traded their two-way for something that more easily handles MP3s.
I myself recently bought a Nokia 6682. Unfortuntely, my contract with Nextel ends in 2007 (and I'm still not sure I could give up my two-way). I only use the phone for data, which probably qualifies me in the category of extreme-nerd. At first, I loved it, but now I'm not so sure. I couldn't figure out exactly what was bothering me until I read this article linked by Alex Bisceglie on his blog.. The Nokia, while having extremely more sophisticated features and functionality just didn't feel right. The article talks about consumer frustration with complicated phone interfaces, but also mentioned one thing that until now I never really realized, Nextel's (which is actually now Sprint Nextel, although I still find the association annoying so I mostly just ignore it) dedication to simple phones. I had never really thought about how easy it was to navigate through my phone until I bought another one. Going into the specifics would be silly, but my two most extreme personal annoyances about the Nokia are, it insists on calling people in my contacts list unless it is locked (which is stupid, my nextel never has to be 'locked') and it doesn't show the damn time on the screen (which is very high up there on reasons why I look at my phone's screen for no apparent reason). Although I found the article slightly ridiculous in assuming that the company is doing something right because their customers spend the most amount of money on data, perhaps there is something to the simple phone.
Perhaps I won't get rid of my poor Nextel afterall. However, I must insist that if they want to keep us dedicated customers, who have been there since the beginning when they had fleets instead of a massive two-way network, they have to make some huge changes. Perhaps their next big plan should be to take the idea of the simple phone and make the best simple phone ever. Just a suggestion.