Canada, British Columbia, Vancouver N8-00 User
On September 11 2011 I upgraded my N8 using this application. The application warned me that I should do a phone back up. It also prompted me that the phone will restart and install. "The phone will start" appears and I can only select the Ok button. When the phone boots up I see a white background with a black rectangle box that says updating and there is a blue bar indicating the progress. After it updated and finished installing, nothing changed other than the firmware number. I was very disappointed and went ahead and downloaded the themes just to see what they are like. They give you 4 choices: Midnight Aqua, Midnight Copper, Midnight Lime and Midnight Silver. They look pretty cool for new looks and you still can tell what the icons represents. Basically the icons have better graphics compared to the default phone icons.
Today September 13 2011, I decided to check the update list using the "meet symbian anna" application's update scan. After the scanning is done Nokia N8-00 software update (important) 24MB was found. After installing this update with the same white screen and blue bar indicator the phone booted up with a slightly different screen. First it asked me for my system language. Then I was forced to register my account that I created on the Ovi Store website. This must be done or else you cannot use your phone. Pressing the home screen button will only prompt you "do you want to use the emergency dial". The first thing I noticed different when typing in my email address was the virtual keypad. The size of the virtual keypad was smaller and the changing of the keypad to keyboard button was different. Instead of having the old three horizontal lines as the switching button they now have a three horizontal line with a 90 degrees corner that points to the top right. This button allows you to switch your virtual keypad to a portrait qwerty keyboard. There is one major draw back though. The portrait qwerty keyboard is opened up in another screen. It is not a pop up keyboard where it shows what you are doing in the background.
After my phone could be used again, I went back to the "Meet Symbian Anna" application and did another update scan. This time it came with two Symbian Anna updates. Symbian Anna Update 1/2 25MB and Symbian Anna update 2/2 24MB. I went for these updates hoping that it would fix that portrait qwerty keyboard jumping to a new screen problem. These updates do not require you to restart your phone. After updating, as usual there was no change.
Knowing that the portrait qwerty keyboard is still not a pop up keyboard, I started to mess around with the settings on my phone. I tried out the new icons by changing the theme of the phone. Changing the theme of the phone is the only way to change your icons. Since I downloaded new themes from the "Meet Symbian Anna" update scan before my phone was officially Symbian Anna, I now have 2 sets of Midnight themes. The ones downloaded before my phone was officially Symbian Anna have a coffee mug icon on the right hand side of the text while the Symbian Anna default themes don't. The default Symbian Anna theme icons are very simple. Every option within the phone has changed to black and white with the default Symbian Anna themes. Some of the icons are over simplified to the point that it is difficult to interpret what they represent. The best example is the calculator. Instead of having a calculator icon, they use the equals sign (=) to represent it. I went back to my downloaded theme icons since they are more intuitive. The default Symbian^3 themes are deleted and I want those back.
After checking out the new icons, I decided to check out the web browser. They improved the interface a lot. the address is always present now on the top of the screen, they made the selection the user has made by using a dotted outline rectangle instead of a light blue rectangle. The main reason why the web browsing is faster because they treat the entire web page as an image. There are draw backs to this, if you are watching a video and you decide to drag down to see the content, the video will pause until you let go of your finger to the screen. Also the video will not even load if you cannot see the video window. The best feature Nokia has made to the web browser is that it will not auto connect to any network, you would have to manually connect yourself. This makes it much easier to handle connections to the internet on your phone.
I also checked out the Social application just to see all the features Nokia has created in Symbian Anna. It turns out that you can log on to Facebook and Twitter only. I only have a Facebook account and the experience on it was splendid.
To summarize, this update finally works in Canada. Nokia did promise the portrait qwerty keyboard, faster web browser experience as well as the Social application. Here are my opinions on the new features based on the implementations Nokia mentioned on the meet Symbian Anna Application:
Fresh Icons
Pros: New looks and feel to the entire phone Operating System. Mild color usage and easy to remember. Menus using black and white icons along with text will not grab too much attention to the icon and allow the user to focus on the text.
Cons: Some icons are over simplified such that they are hard to interpret.
Portrait qwerty keyboard
Pros: Don't need to tilt the phone landscape to use the qwerty keyboard.
Cons: The qwerty keyboard is not a pop up keyboard, it opens up as a new screen which forces the user to memorize which text field they are on and what they are doing.
Web Browser
Pros: Improved user interface, faster browsing on web pages.
Cons: Scrolling web pages will stop all videos and audio that is currently loading on the browser.
Social
Pros: It runs smoothly. Clean interface, smooth browsing just like the web browser.
Cons: Strange error messages on connecting to Facebook. "Unknown error".
Overall I would recommend anyone to upgrade from Symbian^3 to Symbian Anna