An apparently simple idea, and as Steve Rubel said at the time, an interesting one.

Lending sample products to talkative gadget enthusiasts that regularly review new models in their blogs was nothing new.  The key innovation was giving them a blogging space packed with member-only resources which would help to amplify the reach of their blogs and facilitate the development of comment and citation networks both between them and with the wider blogging community. As well as getting access to new gear, the bloggers are clearly benefitting from the information and interaction fostered by the blogger relations blog. (Not to mention the increased traffic.)

However, Oliver Starr makes the point that all would-be copycats should note: "When sending something like these phones to hard core geeks, you'd better be awfully confident that your product is exceptional.” Nokia certainly appear to have been very open, making no restrictions on the blogger reviews that have arisen from this initiative.  They also made sure that the campaign has been managed by a communications consultant with a technology background and his own blog − and with the time and enthusiasm to comment on each review generated by the 50 or so bloggers originally recruited to the scheme.

Gadgets like camera phones (whose output is itself media) lend themselves especially well to well-considered promotion through the blogosphere and other social media. And it's clear from reading the blogger reviews that they are able to give the kind of hands-on perspective of how the devices fit within personal lifestyles that most mainstream journalists wouldn't trouble themselves to reproduce:

“I took a 344MB AVI file of Pirates of the Caribbean and the PC Suite software churned out an 81MB .3gp file that plays like a champ on the Nokia N90. While viewing isn't as great as it is on my PSP, it is nice to know I can do this on the device and save having to take multiple devices on trips.”

Still, there have to be one or two less transparent aspects to this campaign. How, for example, has Nokia managed to keep the flow of reviews so steady over the past three months? And in my review of all the posts I'm sure I spotted at least one blogger who had posted multiple reviews without making the sequence of posts entirely clear.