I really shouldn’t be surprised by this given that The Sun is known to be one of the most useless news sources on the planet but I couldn’t resist commenting on their latest debacle. Yesterday they posted this article about Nokias new Point & Find software (only a week late then) and clearly their journalist, Emma Morton, has NFI (That’s what happens when you do absolutely no research).

Readers should have been tipped off about the shoddy nature of this report when they first saw the picture accompanying the article, a Nokia 7650 from 5 years ago. Don’t The Sun have any better stock photos than that? Moving on from there the whole article is so riddled with inaccuracies that It’s hard to know where to start. The reporter clearly hasn’t grasped the idea that Point & Find is a piece of software that will be available on a range of devices and instead thinks that this is a specific device that will be released as a camera-phone targeted at shoppers. The quote “A prototype is being kept under wraps and will not be launched for about three years, according to the firm.” appears to have been plucked out of thin air as Nokia were very publicly showing this technology off on a couple of different devices at Nokia World last week in front of a host of bloggers and journalists. The Finnish giant also announced that the product would be publicly available next year, not in 3 years time. Finally The Sun also dub Point & Find a “breakthrough concept” when in fact anyone with access to Google or who keeps in touch with the industry will know that this is hardly new territory.

The Sun posting such a shoddy article is one thing, as I said you can’t expect much from that rag. What I find more disappointing is that some popular Mobile Blogs have used this inaccurate piece as source for posts of their own. This story had already been well covered on other Blogs a week earlier but hadn’t been picked up by those blogs back then.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that it’s unfortunate that some bloggers don’t take the time to check their sources. It’s also unfortunate that they tend to rely on traditional forms of news and dismiss that of their peers, especially when their peers are first to the news and have sourced it from an event like Nokia World. Or am I just over-reacting to a silly article?