No new firmware is planned for the Sony Ericsson P990 and W950 after 'R6D23', released two weeks ago. The last firmware release for the M600 was 'R6A16'. Explaining the termination, there's an official statement below from Niklas Sivander, Head of Product Management, Open OS.
Read on in the full article.
This means that either the last FW version is perfect, or they intend to step forward to UIQ 3.1
"Perfect" in this context would mean that it's stable enough for them to get away with not fixing any more issues.
The P990 story has been long and tragic, all based on one unfortunate decision: to implement too many new features at once in a new device. They should have known better, but at least they learned a lesson, as admitted in the statement.
allaboutcelebrity.com/ring/sitemap.htm ringtone <a href=allaboutcelebrity.com/ring/sitemap.htm> ringtone </a> ringtone allaboutcelebrity.com/ring/sitemap.htm verizon ringtones <a href=allaboutcelebrity.com/ring/sitemap.htm> verizon ringtones </a> verizon ringtones allaboutcelebrity.com/ring/sitemap.htm mp3 ringtones <a href=allaboutcelebrity.com/ring/sitemap.htm> mp3 ringtones </a> mp3 ringtones allaboutcelebrity.com/ring/cingular-ringtones.htm cingular ringtone <a href=allaboutcelebrity.com/ring/cingular-ringtones.htm> cingular ringtone </a> cingular ringtone allaboutcelebrity.com/ring/cingular-ringtones.htm download cingular ringtone <a href=allaboutcelebrity.com/ring/cingular-ringtones.htm> download cingular ringtone </a> download cingular ringtone allaboutcelebrity.com/ring/cingular-ringtones.htm cingular ringtones songs <a href=allaboutcelebrity.com/ring/cingular-ringtones.htm> cingular ringtones songs </a> cingular ringtones songs allaboutcelebrity.com/ring/ringtone.htm ringtone <a href=allaboutcelebrity.com/ring/ringtone.htm> ringtone </a> ringtone allaboutcelebrity.com/ring/ringtone.htm motorola ringtones <a href=allaboutcelebrity.com/ring/ringtone.htm> motorola ringtones </a> motorola ringtones allaboutcelebrity.com/ring/ringtone.htm mp3 ringtones <a href=allaboutcelebrity.com/ring/ringtone.htm> mp3 ringtones </a> mp3 ringtones Please, send your abuse here!!! [email][email protected][/email]<a href="http://google1208640264.com">car</a> <a href=http://google1208640264.com>book</a> apple http://google1208640264.com
Steve, thanks for publishing this!
Engadget will follow soon 😉
With about 1.5 years of warranty remaining, SE's decision to stop further fw development for the P990 is unacceptable from the consumers point of view. There are still serious bugs with both the P990 fw and the PCSuite programs and the state of the P990 is nowhere "solid" as SE claims. SE clearly admits that they made a serious error in the design of theP990 but I fail to see why the consumer who bought this phone in good faith should have to pay for SE's mistake. This is just wrong, unethical and unprofessional.
SE knew about these problems since they already stopped production of P990 several months ago but abandoning support while all the P990s are still under warranty and with serious bugs in the fw is just plain stupid and incomprehensible to me and tells a great deal about SE's commitment to its products.
Surely this means they lack resources (talented programmers).
They will just re-focus now on P1i and move on to the next thing that will bring the cash in. Fixing old stuff is probably not the best bet for a hardware company. It is good for service company. As for me, I'm happy I skipped this beta of new Symbian/UIQ platform. What worries me is that there were no compatibility with previous (UIQ) programs. Microsoft proved that this is needed to be successful. Then again, MS is not a hardware company...
We should fight battles we can win
Now that SE have stated that Symbian 9.1 + UIQ3 was a very hard for them we should seek assurances that they are better equipped to deal with Symbian 9.3/9.5 and UIQ3.x otherwise we will NOT buy any of their Smartphones. Realistically we can not reverse the decision to stop supporting the P990 etc but we can make it clear that we will NOT buy the successor products unless they make sure they are in a solid state before launch. AND they should involve us a lot more in testing.
Personally I feel this is being over egged by a vocal minority. Not suprisngly the people who don't have problems don't complain. I do understand the frustration, but commercial realities come into play here. I suspect a relatively small minority of users upgrade their firmware after they buy their phone. There's a balance to be drawn.
That said I'd agree that it would be better if any remaining big bugs were fixed. I think some people would do well to consider what a bug is too - some of the lists that have been sent to me (thanks for all your emails on this subject by the way) have been very liberal with term.
Its also notable that this really only applies to the P990. The M600 and W950 seem to be generally considered more problem free (personally the M600 is absolutely fine for me). This bodes well for the future devices.
It maybe that more RAM should have been included from the beginning (I would imagine many of the problems people have are not bugs as such, but shortage of memory because they as power users are more likely to push the device). However it easier to be wise in hindsight.
I could accept their decision, if the latest firmware was anyway near 'stable', and even then to stop at this point would have been much like a broken promise.
However, what makes this decision totally unacceptable for me, as a user of this phone, is that the latest firmware released for the phone has many many regressions compared to the previous firmware, for the users point of view, and there is no way that users can revert to previous firmwares!
I like the phone itself very much, but in it's present form it is still rather unstable. And the latest firmware, which I haven't installed yet, seems even more unstable in a number of respects.
Some of the regressions should be really easy to fix, too.
So an official response at this point in time should at least have been on the line of 'we are considering your complaints and what can be done to fix issues' rather than leaving users with a text-editing component unable to accept more than 2000 characters in 2 paragraphs, and saying that "This is it, it is over for you guys, you now have a device as stable as it can be within the limits of it's memory".
Regards,
--Tim
Unregistered wrote:I think the P990 will end up damaging SE for the next 3-5 years. Anyone who bought one will be unlikely to buy another SE smartphone, and anyone who waited for it's release will probably not wait for another SE smartphone!
Maybe the P990 is not *so* bad, but it clearly does still have numerous problems, judging by what is being said. The fact that SE have decided to effectively drop all support for what is, for some users at least, a fairly new phone, is hardly what one could call customer-friendly, and will not encourage people to go out and buy their latest offerings.
Yes, they made a terrible mistake with the P990, but the fact is, this could be remedied by continuing development of the firmware. I have had a P910 for 3 years now, and have been very happy with it, but I would certainly not consider replacing it with another SE phone anytime soon....
P910 is a third iteration on the v7/UIQ2 platform. That's one reason why it's so great. The first iteration, the P800, was not a great phone and, just like P990, was delayed for about 3 quarters of a year.
The P1i & W960 represent the third iteration on the v9/UIQ3 platform, whereas P990 was the first iteration. This contributes to pretty good confidence that the P1i will be a great phone.
Here´s El Reg trashing SE actions on this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/28/sony_ericsson_firmware_snub/
And engadget article
SE is screwed..... no way am I going to buy a SE smartphone again - you just can't trust them anymore.
With due respected to Martin's confidence in the P1i - I doubt if I'll place my hard earned cash into SE's hands. Malaysia and Singapore most dealers are refusing to sell the P990 for the last 6 months citing the support requirements and customer hostility is just not worth the trouble.
What is even more digraceful is that they admitted placing the operators' needs before the us the consumer. This is different from iPhone which is screw the operator, user is more important.
Interesting times to see the impact of iPhone and SE's stupid decision only time will tell.
The timing of SE's announcement (i.e. just prior to the iPhone launch) shows just how loose a grasp of marketing and customer relations they have.
I have to laugh out loud at suggestions that the development of the P990 is comparable to the P800. The P800 was the first touchscreen smartphone, the first phone to ever run UIQ and the first smartphone SE had ever produced. The P990 should have been a walk in the part by comparison. SE lost me as a user when they stopped updating the P900 in a similar fashion (except that phone was much more stable from day one).
Thanks but I'll stick with my S60 based N95 and any further trips I take into the world of touchscreen smartphones are as likely to bear the apple logo as the SE one.
The P1i & W960 represent the third iteration on the v9/UIQ3 platform, whereas P990 was the first iteration. This contributes to pretty good confidence that the P1i will be a great phone.
That's all well and good, but it doesn't help those P990 users who would like to see the firmware for their expensive phones to continue to be updated. I'm not sure that those people who spent a large amount of money on their P990s will appreciate being classed as beta-testers for the P1i.
The fact that SE screwed up with the P990 does not excuse them from prematurely dropping their support for it...
I believe the iPhone will prove to be far less userfriendly than even the first firmware version of the P990.
In contrast I have many friends and family who think the P990 is the best phone they ever had.
sovind wrote:Malaysia and Singapore most dealers are refusing to sell the P990 for the last 6 months citing the support requirements and customer hostility is just not worth the trouble.
How long do Nokia release firmware revisons for?
Surely thats important?
I thik SE is dropping alot of eggs - I wonder how long they can keep it up?
SE mis-sold the top-priced P990 for a business user to "leave their laptop in the office", but it can't successfully multitask routine built-in pda apps. Just start the music player, RSS Feeds, web browser over wi-fi, and try opening a contact and calendar (maybe to check / set an appointment). Guaranteed something will fail. And woe betide you if an incoming phone call gets added to the mix. Mark you, this is not just a phone, this is a SMART (not!) phone. Not to mention sundry oddities and quirks.
Worse, as designed with memory-hungry systems and limited (64 MB) program memory - not data storage - this inadequacy is predictable. DOH! SE's pre-release advertising was misleading on this. Misundertanding caused by incompetence or deliberately misleading? Either way, it seems they now don't give a horse's a**. They're abandoning the white elephant even before the 1-year manufacturer's warranty runs out. Seems like a prime candidate for a global class-action suit.