Nokia Tossed out a Little White Lie during its Lumia 920 Launch but Got Caught, so the Company Has Apologized. Apology Accepted!

By now it is old news but it is worth a quick review. During the Nokia Lumia 920 announcement last week, Nokia showed off a video, a part of which Nokia claimed at the time was produced utilizing the PureView camera technology being introduced that same day as a key feature of the new Lumia 920 smartphone. The video was very nice indeed -- almost reminiscent of the sort of stuff many people have used the iPhone to produce over the last few years. It turns out however -- thanks to the diligent investigative work of several independent bloggers and The Verge -- that there was a slight glitch to the whole thing…

It turns out that the good folks at Nokia that created the video most assuredly did not use the Lumia 920 -- or for that matter the PureView 808 Symbian smartphone that sports the really cool high end PureView technology. Rather, they used good old fashioned video technology to do so. A day later, the company had to apologize all over again when it turned up that a number of still images that were supposedly taken with the Lumia 920 as part of a promotional package hadn't in fact been taken by the PureView at all. So in the span of several days Nokia had to apologize not once, but twice for putting out some misleading information.

When all is said and done, the misinformation really was nothing more than a couple of white lies, yet these are the sorts of things that can burn a brand's honor and reputation and bring a company down to its knees. If a company loses customer trust and becomes, well, untrustworthy, the damage to the brand is likely to take a long time to undo. For Nokia though, the company is already teetering, so perhaps it didn't feel like it had much to lose.

It isn't clear from anything Nokia has put out about the incident as to who was responsible for the decision to include video and still photography (all of which was taken when the Lumia 920 was in preproduction so that it was literally impossible to use the Lumia 920 to take the video or photos) and then attribute it to the Lumia 920. Our guess is that more than likely some low level employee figured there was no way anyone would figure it out and decided to push the white lie envelope.

Nokia claims that there was absolutely no intention to mislead, but clearly there was such intention. The real issue is whether or not the intentions came from the top of the food chain or from the lower level employee end. A Nokia ethics and compliance officer has launched an internal investigation; we wish him or her luck but at this point we also need to move on from it.

We'll stick with our low level employee belief here and give Nokia a pass on it -- an apology accepted. Now all Nokia needs to do is get back to business and deliver the beast. Unfortunately Nokia will have a hard enough time doing so with also compounding its problems with the white lie snafu. Nokia is under some perhaps surrealistic pressure at this point to deliver -- we hope the company does -- as we've noted elsewhere the world needs Nokia to succeed and to help balance things out in the smartphone world.

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