Still getting my head around all this 'smartphone' business. Up until a couple of weeks ago I used my old Nokia for making calls. How quaint is that?
Anyhoo, to make life more simple I'm trying to equate my N95 8GB to my PC. But smaller. When I install the latest firmware from Nokia am I effectively formatting the phone? Am I wiping it and starting again, much like a format and reinstall of Windows/Linux/whatever? Can the downloaded firmware be compared to a fresh install of an OS?
I suppose where I stumble is the fact that the N95 obviously has 'phone memory' and 'mass memory'. Two drives if I'm understanding things correctly. Reinstalling the firmware seems to wipe the 'mass memory' but does it wipe and reinstall essential apps to the 'phone memory'?
Thank you for your patience 😊
upgrading fimrware does reformat your phone, much like reformatting a windows pc. rgarding the two seperate drives, i think someone with an 8GB version could answer this.
Updating the firmware is like flashing the BIOS in the PC, but so that the whole operating system is in ROM (that's the Z-drive), and in addition the phone memory (C-drive) is also reformatted.
Updating the firmware does not touch the SIM card, nor a memory card or mass memory (if there is no memory card). The memory card or separate mass memory. Technically, the mass memory could be allocated from the same Flash memory chips as the phone memory, but it could also be entirely different chips (or just one, depending on the size).
Ah, so reinstalling the firmware sorts out the phone memory and installs the 'OS' but leaves any music/photos/apps that are in mass memory (the 8gig bit) alone?
Correct. However, some apps do not properly recover (some do), because there's an automatic reinstallation phase, after formatting the phone memory (explicitely or through a firmware update), when applications (or themes) are detected on the mass memory/memory card.
To avoid that, I save all original installation files, and all other files on a PC, and before I update the firmware, I reformat the mass memory, and after updating I reinstall the apps and copy all other files (music, photos, etc.) back.
To keep settings and other data, you can also uninstall the apps in App.mgr first, and then use the "Memory" app to do a backup, before reformatting (then you have to save the backup.arc file on a PC and then copy it back after reformatting the mass memory, and then use it to restore settings, messages, contacts, etc.). Note, that if you use N-Gage, then reinstall N-Gage first, and then do the backup restore, and then reinstall the N-Gage games. That way your N-Gage profile and game saves are also restored properly.