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N95 v21 firmware review

13 replies · 5,278 views · Started 13 May 2008

emerher 13 May 2008, 20:27

I was just wondering what Nokia should include in the next firmware-release after v21 for the nokia n95-1. After I upgraded from v20 to v21 I had many expectations concerning the changelog (http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/forum//forum/thread/58226/): Flashlite3, faster menu, rotation improvements...
however, here's a BIG, FAT buglist:

- Flashlite works fairly good with youtube although quality is worse than with mobitubia or emtube BUT other flashsites as myvideo.de or google video are terribly slow (50% speed, sound not properly synched) AND when resizing the page (to 75 or 50%) only the left quarter of a video is displayed
- opening menu folders hasn't become faster; only if folders have already been opened and therefore loaded into the RAM the menu seems faster
- rotation improvements are only noticeable when rotating the screen while displaying pictures or when having zoomed in. in all other situations screen rotation has become even slower (e.g. in the menu, or when having a full active standy with calendar and to do entries) AND when rotating the screen counterclockwise (e.g. with rotateme) there are loads of localization errors (e.g. OPTIONS and BACK are interchanged) and the camera viewfinder mirrors everything; in general, rotation is not very responsive
- and that's another annoying bug: the device has become less responsive (is this the revenge of the keypress bug??:tongue😊
- i'm getting the feeling that the e3 demo has a reduced framerate compared to v20
- "GPS position acquisition is *much* faster than in V20." <- this is simply not true, it still takes around 2 or 3 minutes without A-GPS to lock my position
- if light sensor is set to minimum, the backlight sometimes is switched off even if I'm in a quite dark ambience (-> I can't see anything for approx. 10 seconds😮)
- sometimes WLAN-scanning just goes off involuntarily and, even if I switched it off, the phone displays all available networks
- standby-time improvements? i didn't realize any. I checked v20 with Nokias energy profiler (switched off everything possible, offline mode, no memory card inserted -> 0.06W) and then v21 (same process, again 0.06W)
- WLAN wizard has remained the same; if I want to choose e.g. my home wlan "ConnectionPoint" (secure) it is not always displayed in the access point list. then I choose "search for wlan" to find it; everything's alright, "ConnectionPoint" is found but when I choose it, I have to enter the WEP key - extremely annoying!!!
- a couple of bugs can be found in the music player. the responsibility of the media keys is considerably slow, it takes half a second to e.g. pause - I want it to pause immediately! And, if you push the keys several times in a row it stops the music only after your last push.
- the volume keys are not switched when changing to landscape mode; it means that when playing back a video you have to press the LEFT volume key while the volume bars rise in the RIGHT direction
- the browser is not fully developed; when rendering a website, the browser gives you a "first glance" at some parts of the page, but then there's a couple of seconds a white screen after which the browser renders the rest of the page. I don't get it, does the browser get the desktop resolution at first and then tries to allocate every object to the phones' resolution? Tell me.
- layer ads cannot be closed as they are wandering together with the mouse
- and lastly, when trying to watch flash vids not on youtube in landscape mode, the browser often crashes.

I don't think these bugs are related to my device only as there would be no logical reason for this (I mean NSU distributes the same firmware to everyone with n95-1 and I definitely don't have hardware-related issues)
Okay, enough about bugs. I would like to give my thoughts about what should be included in the next firmware-release:

- ASR (as seen on n95 8gb v20)
- everything should be supported by the 3d accelerator, esp. Flashlite 3 (it uses the CPU only), then video playback would work way better
- page file (no more memory leaks); I'd rather have a temporary slow reaction of the phone while it does memory-eating procedures like videoediting than "out-of-memory" popups
- there should be an expert's view option in the settings app to have access to more specific settings
- GPS data should be queried at least each half a second from the chip to have a smoother position tracking. it would also be more accurate, since there wouldn't be such large jumps from one position to another when driving really fast
- one should be able to switch WLAN completely off, not just the scanning; correct me if I'm wrong, but how can it be possible that even if WLAN is supposedly switched off, the scanning starts so incredibly fast? shouldn't there be a warmup phase of the antenna??

Alright, this was my first post EVER on a forum so don't blame me for the length.... I hope you guys read it and provide me with answers and opinions!!!

bchliu 14 May 2008, 10:36

The N95-1 usually gets whatever the N95-2 ROM gets (feature and functionality wise) and a version behind..

tonymy01 14 May 2008, 12:36

Remove rotateme and see what you think? I removed that with the previous f/w revision as it was a largish CPU cycle hog and the phone response was terrible.

emerher 15 May 2008, 19:15

to bchliu: are you sure? i think if the n95-1 got everything the n95 8gb gets there wouldn't be many reasons to buy the n95 8gb version (which is way more expensive) so I think especially ASR is a great selling point and thus nokia won't include it in the original o95s firmware
To tonymy01: i think disabling rotateme should be enough, shouldn't it?

bchliu 15 May 2008, 22:23

emerher: Yep. Everything that went into the most recent N95-1 firmware (V21) is the same as the previous version of the N95-2 (V12). Expect when the new N95-1 firmware comes out to be the same as the current N95-2 firmware (V20) with the auto flip screen etc.

BTW: 3D Accelerator code would be beautiful, but highly doubt it since Nokia shares similar codes (S60v3 base kernel) across most of their phones (and most of their phones do not have 3D Acceleration like the N95/N82/E90). Would be nice if there was a "Glass aero" like interface on it eh? But then again, the battery life sucks enough on the N95 anyway.. any further CPU/GPU usage will drain it even more.

Where are the promised fuel cells??? sigh..

emerher 16 May 2008, 13:15

bchliu wrote:emerher: Yep. Everything that went into the most recent N95-1 firmware (V21) is the same as the previous version of the N95-2 (V12). Expect when the new N95-1 firmware comes out to be the same as the current N95-2 firmware (V20) with the auto flip screen etc.

BTW: 3D Accelerator code would be beautiful, but highly doubt it since Nokia shares similar codes (S60v3 base kernel) across most of their phones (and most of their phones do not have 3D Acceleration like the N95/N82/E90). Would be nice if there was a "Glass aero" like interface on it eh? But then again, the battery life sucks enough on the N95 anyway.. any further CPU/GPU usage will drain it even more.

Where are the promised fuel cells??? sigh..

thx for giving me hope:tongue: but are there settings for ASR on the current n95-8gb firmware (sensitivity, on/off) or is it always on (what could end up in chaos)??

true, true nokia can't change the whole code of symbian 9.2 only for a couple of phones (maybe Symbian Touch will have full 3D accelerator support just like the iphone); but what is the 3D-accelerator for then? I mean there is the N-Gage 2.0 which doesn't care about the accelerator and there are only very few games on the market which support it because a certificate allowing the usage of the acceleration is really expensive😡
(sorry I forgot to mention the TV-output, well, this is some great stuff)

you want fuel cells? yeah, me too, but shake-batteries would be more realistic! when the battery is empty, just shake the phone for a minute and voila, you can make a call!😃

besides, what do you think about a pagefile? didn't you experience out-of-memory situations within the browser even with demand paging yet??

emerher 21 May 2008, 16:17

hey people, post your opinions about the review and whether you have the same bugs or not

and tell me what you would like to have in the next firmware

can16358p 22 May 2008, 17:05

I know it's not much relevant, but shouldn't Nokia put a notification icon for open lens cover on N95 standard edition. I sometimes forget the lens cover open, there should be a notification for lens cover in the corner. (just like new message, keylock, item in outbox...)

emerher 22 May 2008, 17:39

can16358p wrote:I know it's not much relevant, but shouldn't Nokia put a notification icon for open lens cover on N95 standard edition. I sometimes forget the lens cover open, there should be a notification for lens cover in the corner. (just like new message, keylock, item in outbox...)

True true, same shit happens to me. Fortunately I don't have any scratches on the lens yet!

emerher 07 Jun 2008, 12:04

c'mon anyone else sharing my opinion about the features which should be added to the next firmware releases??

tigerfox 08 Jun 2008, 10:39

yeah, i just regret upgrading v13 orange to v21 generic. Things like gps tracking is much slowing in tracking possition.
phone is sluggish in opening folders etc. rotate me isnt as fast. etc etc.

Most people say v21 should be better, which i would have thought is tru, but im just getting a worse experience.

argh 09 Jun 2008, 01:01

tigerfox wrote:yeah, i just regret upgrading v13 orange to v21 generic. Things like gps tracking is much slowing in tracking possition.
phone is sluggish in opening folders etc. rotate me isnt as fast. etc etc.

Most people say v21 should be better, which i would have thought is tru, but im just getting a worse experience.

With respect to the gps initial lock (if that's your issue), have you checked that the agps server is set to supl.nokia.com? On my firmware update to v21, I ended up with some other server that didn't seem to do anything. Once I changed it back, I got almost instant locks again.