RAM upgrade for N95

Why does a Google search in your post look promising?

Maybe Chucky fits ram? 🙄

It's supposed to be a Google Cache link, but it got mucked up 😛

Considering the fact that our device is referred to (by Nokia) as "Multi-Media Computer", it is only natural that we'd upgrade the RAM on our computers.

I guess that if 1% of the customers who like such an upgrade, would write their expectations to Nokia, they may consider something.

I also agree this device has a huge potential; The CPU is like a prisoner in a small RAM cell.

It may be technically too complex for Nokia to support a mass upgrade. On the other hand, no one would have thought Apple would provide 100$ credits to their iPhone customers, so it won't hurt trying.

I would pay 60$ for 128MB.

Sorry!

I'll try the link again!

http://www.symbian-freak.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10859

I would also pay $60 for 128Mb.

s

sturgeon wrote:Sorry!

I'll try the link again!

http://www.symbian-freak.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10859

I would also pay $60 for 128Mb.

s

Then again you have fixed the ram issue but then their is the issue of battery and GPS sensitivity, Larger Screen. You fix one problem but leave many others, thats what the Nokia 8GB unfortunately is here for.

You can keep your N95 8Gb !

My GPS is just fine and I'm happy with the existing screen - I plug in to a TV if necessary. I can also cope with the current battery. I use a car charger whenever I need to and top up the battery as often as req.

Just give me the RAM ! (Or make the OS consume so little it releases loads, or give the thing a swap file).

s.

What worries me is the new black N95. It seems like Nokia will release that as a fix to all the hardware issues on our phones (RAM, battery etc) and that will be that, no effort to improve or resolve the issues with the classic N95. After all, why would they release a new model if they could just fix the issues on the current one.

Exactly. If a company is releasing a newer model then it's probably a good sign that they won't be wasting resources upon older models.

I would assume the ram inside the N95 is part of the system board inside the phone and that it wouldn't be expandable or removable.

GPS sensitivity? I'm not aware of any changes in the GPS chip on the N95 8GB - as far as I've been aware, other than changing the RAM chips and swapping the microSDHC slot for on-board flash, there's no changes to the electronics. I'm sure it'll come with AGPS as standard, but the N95 has that in V12 anyway.

A 0.2" larger screen, while not a bad thing, isn't really a big deal when it's the same resolution.

Just to throw a spanner in the works, Just changing the chip may not work. There will be a different device ID that the software may not like, a chip with larger memory might also have the address and data lines slightly different even though it is the same package. Iv seen this a fair few times in my line of work, rest assured it would not be a simple swap!!

Hi,
coming from the Palm corner of things, I can say that these things were done often in the poast; sometimes even just with simple solder/desolder.

However, IMHO, nowadays, the tinyness of components and also the raising complexity of OSses has made this very difficult..I cant recall anything like that ever happening after the m505 from Palm's and a few old HP PPC'S.

Quakester2000 wrote:Then again you have fixed the ram issue but then their is the issue of battery and GPS sensitivity, Larger Screen. You fix one problem but leave many others, thats what the Nokia 8GB unfortunately is here for.

Well...... No....... Its not, Nokia have always crippled their phones in one way or another with dismal design decisions. But then nokia have always been a company for the masses rather than using a phone and saying "you know what would be good and not irritiating". They stopped innovating years ago where as they used to be the masters of it ( snake anyone ). They got big and started taking a backseat looking at what was popular then doing a hash job of putting it in a phone which is why they lost a lot of their smartphone customers over to Sony and HTC and I think they are slowly realising that the "I want a cheap phone" market is slowly disapearing and simply flooding the market with 80 different handsets isnt going to cut it. Theres now to much choice now LG, Samsung etc and its all slowly eating into their market share..

They are once again trying to improve on the smartphone bandwagon but the The N95 offers very little new (all of these features such as GPS have been in smartphones for years and guess what.... they were better ) The N95 however tempted me enougth to go and buy one and as much as I love it (tis a great handset) im still seeing the same mistakes that just make you slap your head and say WHY!

The N95 has many but the basic list (imo) of faults.

Poor GPS reception ( honestly even with A-GPS my cheap tacky receiver from Ebay gets a quicker lock and it was all of what £20 and no AGPS? on a £500 smartphone I don't expect to be waiting 2 minutes for a Fix in a 2 degree car freezing my nuts off ) the 8GB model does not fix this, or the fact the location wins spacker of the year award ( Nokia claim the gps was designed with walking in mind..... with approx 2 hours of use ummm yeah right well done nokia screw you over when you have walked 4 miles and the battery dies leaving you stranded in a field ) everyone with an ounce of brain realises that car navigation is where its at you dont buy a mapping company and provide turn by turn instructions for walkers the mistakes have already been made ( tom tom et al ) get a decent chipset and allow the phone to aquire a quick fix and work with dodgy heat reflective windscreens etc.

No charging from the USB ( oh god why this almost makes it the laughing stock of the smart-phone world simply because docking it or plugging it into the USB will kill your battery in about few hours when it could be charging it ) again the 8GB model does not fix this. Finally a mainstream memory card format, no going off on a tangent with obscure formats such as RS-DVMMC but a standard format and a standard connectivity and oh wait what?

Dismal Battery - Well a 25% boost is nice and I suppose helps get you to work if you forget to charge it at night BUT the phone is small enough and light enough to warrant a increase the size by about 7-10mm in all directions to allow for a 1600-1800mah battery.

Lack of Ram - This has been addressed quite well in the 8GB imo the ONLY benifit of the new model (along with the slightly larger screen which wouldn't be an issue if they didn't try making it too compact)

Now the cons - 8GB is very nice but Nokia in true "make it cheap release it quick" style they have dumped the SD slot and chucked a mass storage chip on board..... epic fail 🙄 giving you an SD slot AND making the primary on board memory 8GB would have been the logical choice but I guess doing what they have was just easy. Now the phone has no expansion and although 8GB is a lot of memory in a few months we will have 8GB MicroSD cards not only that but they will be hot swapable... the N95 even with 1GB hot swappable cards wins purely because in a years time when you have a few thousand MP3s and your phone is complaining that it cant store camera photos you will know why.

No Camera Shutter - This being a con? only time will tell but every smartphone ive owned as at some point ended up with degrading quality as the plastic cover gets scratched by keys etc in the pocket. My last HTC phone I had to take a large sharp imstrument and remove the plastic cover it was that bad which I regretted as the lens got filled with fluff. Only time will tell if my N95-1 shutter is more protective but I can see that cover (with me and no doubt the majority of the market) will get owned in about 8 months and the minor scratched will show up big style on the 5MP photos.

Releasing 8GB models of their old phones is just standard nokia tactics from what Ive seen. Every phone thay have released has met the scorn of their customers when they release pretty mucht he same phone but better to taunt thier ever loyal fan base. We all knew it was going to happen, but to happen so quickly? They could have done a LOT better both in terms of fixes and sales ( of the classic ) by holding of on the replacement until people where chomping at the bit. Why is as usual beyond my understanding.

Re: the GPS point, I agree.

My personal opinion is that they should have used sirf3. Its the whole walking argument again. Imo any satnav device needs to be plugged in. Regardless of device, its going to have screen on, voice instructions, be working a little to calculate route and provide instructions, and obviously get a GPS signal.

Having said that, my 6110 seems to be a world apart from most N95's. I get a signal usually quite quick (I never use AGPS due to my data charges), and Im sure its the same chipset (sirf2LP) thats used in the N95. Perhaps better placed, as it is in the slide at the top of the phone.

Windows mobile is still a little too unwieldy for me, but I would have moved over to them had there been a device to tempt me.

What I want is a phone which:

Isnt too big - N95/6110 size is the max

Has built in GPS reciever

Has a keypad - touch screen is too slow and unwieldy for me

Has a decent camera - 2MP at least, preferably with a flash.

Build quality and reliability I can trust - nokia are generally good for this, but I stay away from their N range for obvious reasons.

Has all the usual stuff - bluetooth, standard mini USB interface, expandable memory, etc.

At present, there is no windows mobile device which fits the bill.

As for the extra RAM, I severly doubt anyone will get it working smoothly, if at all.

Well no for the Touch Screen point I agree with you I thought I would miss that but in truth I only rearlly miss it in one situation and that was/is Tom Tom. The Symbian version of tom tom is paiiinnnnful the UI is just urghhh and it rearlly doesent need to be! The zoom is just press one to nine and hope for the best. You also cant touch a POI and to get tooltip infomation like the non-symbian versions as you can naver quite get the blue crosshairs over the icon. You have to play with the zoom and the directional arrows and hope but in general it just doesent work. This is Tom Toms problem though and not Nokias but I will admit its very difficault to find a "Good" touchscreen on a phone and most smartphones still have scrollbars down the side that only work if your a woman or guitar player. I actually miss the slideout full keyboard the most I HATE predictive text and well ummm I have a N95 😉

The first time I used the maps application I was sat in my garden and I waited and waited and waiting and almost fell asleep and dispite the fact I had 4 full sat bars it just took ages to go black and find my location.

Vodafone sent our company the first IPAQ navigator ages before they launched them officially (if that ever happened) I was most impressed with the GPS on that and that was over a year ago.

Camera wise - For its faults I have never found any problem with nokias cameras where the complete opposite can be said for every windows smartphone ive used.

Build Quality I will agree ive never rearlly had a Nokia thats failed on me ( aside from crashes ) touch wood.

Mini USB is rearlly only a recentish thing isnt it? ( I say this to mean this year ) it was one of the swaying factors for me although I was NOT impressed in the fact that when my shiney N95 arrived at the office and I plugged it in and installed Nokia Suite ( a vast improvement on that tacky Java Thing I used a few years ago ) only to have the phone bitch at me like a gir about how it was low on battery 🙄 only to find out oh wait a 5v charger?

Good to see Nokia are using a standard memory card now and non of this "lets be different and try something new" I remeber buying my 6630 and then having to wait 4 months for a memory card bigger than 32mb *shudders*

As for buttons.... well I think we are going to kiss goodbye to them over the next few years Nokia including :/ people just seem to want having a responsive panel that is black and smudges.

Also Nokia SERIOUSLY are not starting to reuse model numbers are they? I still have an old 6110 somewhere time for the friday ad and some fun me things 😉

🙄

Oh yes, they are! I can tell you when I started researching the 6110 it did produce a few 'WTF?s'.

Ive got an old mio168 with TT5 that still beats all the satnav programs I tried on my phone.

Now the mio has almost the same processor speed as the navigator, and screen aside I really dont see why the PDA versions should be so much better than symbian. Lack of interest I suppose.

Yeah, mini USB is recentish, but on a new device it should have this as its becming nearly standard (and yes I agree with you, they should charge via it as well).

Though to be fair, nokia are certainly not 'lets charge users pounds for data cables and chargers' company. Although they did change the charger size recently, its still the same charger for all new types of phone.

I cant see buttons dying out. Certainly, we are going to see a flood of touchscreen phones come out but theres too many people that prefer a keypad to touchscreen for them to be replaced.

For the record, I turn predicive text off as soon as I get a phone. :tongue:

Im prepared to suffer a bit of UI for the sake its on symbian (although not to the extent of copilot - what a load of shite that was!), but hopefully TT make an effort with version 7.

In the meantime, I continue to look at GPS enabled windows phones with increasing intrest.

I don't get people who turn predictive text off.. I can't stand using a phone without it 😛

As for why they used the GPS chip they did, I suspect there's two reasons: one being that it's low power (I expect a SiRFStar III chipset would use more, and I've actually not noticed the N95's hitting the battery all that much), but also because it's made by TI, who make the system platform (OMAP2420), so it integrates easily and presumably Nokia get a discount for buying more from the same company.

Left home this am at 06.00. I have used the n95 extensively all day. Watched tv on the train up to london, made some longish calls, 6 or 7 txts, checked and answered my emails 5 times, used GPS to find my hotel and around the west end, checked the forums (3 of them) 4 or 5 times and made a few posts including this one. No resets or crashes and no memory problems of any kind.
For me this phone does it's job perfectly and that is why I got it, to do a job. I don't think any other phone would have done as well.
I have just got the low battery warning so in with the portable charger. Smiles from me.
Went into the new SE shop in Knightsbridge and not one smartphone with HSDPA. There's got to be something wrong with that?

Mithent wrote:I don't get people who turn predictive text off.. I can't stand using a phone without it 😛

As for why they used the GPS chip they did, I suspect there's two reasons: one being that it's low power (I expect a SiRFStar III chipset would use more, and I've actually not noticed the N95's hitting the battery all that much), but also because it's made by TI, who make the system platform (OMAP2420), so it integrates easily and presumably Nokia get a discount for buying more from the same company.

I have it switched on however if your writing stuff thats not in the dictionary it takes longer (which is quite often when you get a new phone) so a lot of people disable it. I'm still amazed that t9 hasn't really involved since it was first implemented it could be so much more intelligent ah well.

The most infuriating thins is when your typing say a 7 letter word it gets it correct up to letter 6 and then on the 7th starts suggesting bizzar combinations that none of them match th word then you have to delete one letter re-choose the right spelling and then press right and enter the last letter and then does it enter the whole new word into the dictionary....... nope 😛 simple ideas such as suggesting pluralisations when you press s after a word are still non existent after years and years of using T9.

As far as sat-nav goes the better GPS performance vs the extra power hit is one thing I COULD live with, nobody buys nokias "built for walkers crap" how many people walk by major roads and motorways? If this was the case then OS style maps would be more appropriate. IF I use sat nav then I keep the phone plugged in and the loss of 10 Min's of sat nav use isn't *that* much of an issue to most people where as sitting in a cold or baking hot car for 2 Min's while it looks for a sat lock is.

Nokia Brought a mapping company, they know damn well what the market was, they can look at any sat nav company for past mistakes so why emulate them and THEN try to cover their idiocy by Pooh-poohing them.

As far as sat-nav goes the better GPS performance vs the extra power hit is one thing I COULD live with, nobody buys nokias "built for walkers crap" how many people walk by major roads and motorways? If this was the case then OS style maps would be more appropriate.

Exactly (check out viewranger BTW, it rocks).

It could be argued that its useful to find various things in cities/towns, but its address finder is sorely lacking for that.

I actually think the chip is good enough, assuming its the same one in the 6110. No, its not as good as a sirf3, but its plenty good enough for navigating on the roads. I think the N95 was very poorly implemented, quite possibly due to other hardware in there having to be where it is.

Im shocked at the initial RAM given out. Given the huge amount of things it can do, it really should have been given 128.

Went into the new SE shop in Knightsbridge and not one smartphone with HSDPA. There's got to be something wrong with that?

Assuming SE = Sony Ericsson, theres lots wrong with that. AFAIK its not too hard to include it in phones now. Its in my 6110. Ho hum. Still, I dont touch them because they are very ugly square things. MPO only of course. 😉

Getting back a little to the topic at hand, it has to be said that RAM in the N95-1 should either be used more efficiently or somehow increased. But should the N95-8Gb or some horrible hack be the solution to this?

Why can't a portion of the microSD card be used as RAM? It's been done before with Microsoft Vista and USB memory sticks (A feature called ReadyBoost, if I'm not mistaken). Even if just 64Mb of the card was used, it would double the RAM available for the phone.

I think Nokia should include a feature like this in a future firmware update so that those who have microSD cards in their N95's can take advantage of it. They could change it so it takes either a certain percentage of the card to use as RAM, or allow the user to specify how much to use in some sort of Advanced Settings section or something. Alternatively, maybe someone could write a 3rd-party application to pull this off.

Can something like this be achieved at all?

[SIZE="1"]BTW Sorry if anyone's already mentioned a similar solution...[/SIZE]

Well, there is an answer to the N95-1's RAM being used more efficiently - it's Demand Paging, which was recently announced, and the demo showed an N95-1 with 35MB of RAM free on boot, and which could run Web and Maps together without trouble. Unfortunately it's very unclear whether Demand Paging will be released for the N95-1, with various sources either saying it definitely won't or it's likely it will.

Mithent wrote:Well, there is an answer to the N95-1's RAM being used more efficiently - it's Demand Paging, which was recently announced, and the demo showed an N95-1 with 35MB of RAM free on boot, and which could run Web and Maps together without trouble. Unfortunately it's very unclear whether Demand Paging will be released for the N95-1, with various sources either saying it definitely won't or it's likely it will.

Demand Paging only works on Symbian 9.3 FP2 (the operating system).

The N95 does not (and probably never will have) the required OS version, therefore Demand Paging will only appear on future Nokia Smartphone models.

Well let's hope dez is wrong and this is true then!

"zorbas
ODP will be included later in N95 FW update. I've been running it for a month now and it's very very nice...

Unregistered
to Zorbas: Why do you know so clearly that this is coming as an update to N95?
We also have already seen a proto N95 with VGA screen and a 6290 with Feature Pack 2 and that still does not mean that we ever see any of these phones updated with these features. 😉

zorbas
Its already available internally for all nokia employees..."

(From the Demonstrating Demand Paging in Symbian OS 9.3 comments feature in AAS)

s.

This is still a confusing area - I've seen some reports saying that it was back-ported to Symbian OS 9.2 for the N95 8GB, and if so it wouldn't be hard to release it on the N95-1, although Nokia might not want to.

Mithent wrote:This is still a confusing area - I've seen some reports saying that it was back-ported to Symbian OS 9.2 for the N95 8GB, and if so it wouldn't be hard to release it on the N95-1, although Nokia might not want to.

In which case, they could adopt my ReadyBoost idea 😉

Its wether they will want to.

It might have been back ported but its still not present in the original OS and seeng nokia want people to upgrade its not in their interest.

Indeed, fixing one of the N95-1's biggest problems removes most of the upgrade incentive. I suppose the cynical could say that they had the N95 8GB on the roadmap when the N95-1 was released and, seeing that it wasn't going to be a huge upgrade, deliberately held back on the RAM. I'm not saying I think they did though!

How long has the N95 been out in the shops? Since February or so? I don't see how Nokia can benefit from holding back on the RAM when the phone isn't even a year old (Only just over a year if you consider some sources that say it was available since Sept '06 - maybe as sim free). I know you said that's what the cynical may think, and you're right... they might.

It's possible that Nokia had the 8Gb one in the pipeline anyway, as you've said. I kinda see it like a Music Edition of the N95 (Which they've done before with the N70 and N73, for example). Also as well, it's entirely possible that Nokia simply didn't anticipate how much RAM the N95 needed in reality. From a business point of view, in my opinion, they need to do their best in order to rectify that flaw. Releasing a new version of the phone is one way of dealing with it, but they need to do something to help those who already bought the earlier version, especially since the phone is still in it's infancy.

I can understand that by fixing one of the flaws in the N95 it can adversly effect the upgrade incentive to the 8Gb one, but how many people are really willing to upgrade their phone to practically the same one they've already got? Take into consideration that some people don't get free upgrades on their contracts, and some aren't on contracts at all, so they'd have to buy the phone again.

If there's a solution to the problem that Nokia has proven works, which involves introducing a firmware update, then they should implement it.

Sorry, that's my rant over for now :redface: