Kudos to AAS friend Matthew Miller for putting together a gloriously techy article on how to rid your S60 3rd Edition FP2-toting (ho yes) AT&T-branded Nokia E71x of all of its Java trialware and bloatware. Bottom line: an hour of effort and you've got yourself a lean and fit smartphone that's more advanced in many ways than the E71 the rest of the world is enjoying.
Read on in the full article.
How is it more advanced?
The E71 only has S60 3rd Edition FP1. FP2 has faster USB speeds, OTA firmware updates, better media handling, better access point handling and much more.... Admittedly, I can't vouch for how much of the above AT&T might have taken OUT, but..... 8-)
You just made the case for FP2 upgrades for older devices.
I can't believe there are severe hardware impediments to prevent this.
This is yet another reason to only buy unlocked sim-free devices, they are guaranteed to be free of network operator gunk (though of course manufacturers seem to be pre-loading their own gunk nowadays! 😊 ).
The E71 uses FP1 because at the time it was released that was the most stable version of S60. FP2 has apparently become more stable since then so it was used on the E71x.
You just made the case for FP2 upgrades for older devices.
I can't believe there are severe hardware impediments to prevent this.
I could be wrong, but I'm not actually sure that there IS any major hardware impediment to prevent upgrades on Symbian devices.
There was some discussion about this, and apparently the main problem was legal, to do with licensing the Symbian OS. The manufacturer (Nokia) only purchased a licence for one version of Symbian for each handset. That meant that if a newer version of Symbian appeared (such as S60v3 FP2) it couldn't be used on handsets that already had the older version because the terms of the licence didn't cover it.
However, that situation has now changed completely.
Symbian has become the Symbian Foundation, it is now going open source, and it no longer requires any kind of licence payment from manufacturers, so the licensing problem no longer exists. In legal terms, Nokia could make their future Symbian devices upgradeable to the latest version of Symbian as long as the hardware was good enough to run it.
This is what Nokia has consistently done with their internet tablets, which use an open source royalty-free platform called Maemo Linux. If a new version of Maemo appears, you can update your tablet to use it, as long as the hardware is good enough. This has brought a lot of benefits to users, for example the N800 tablet's CPU used to run at 330mhz but thanks to power-saving measures in Maemo 4 the new OS version increased the N800's processor speed to 400mhz without reducing battery life.
If Nokia have allowed upgrades with Maemo for several years now, they could probably allow upgrades with Symbian devices that use the royalty-free version of Symbian.
Unless I'm much mistaken, he hasn't got rid of any of the applications, as they are still installed on Z drive (ie. the ROM). All he's done is get rid of the icons, which is simple to achieve by moving unwanted icons to a folder called rubbish, unused, whatever.
As far as I can see, the phone is no leaner or fitter than before, because nothing has actually changed, apart from the removal of some icons, especially as none of the applications in question seem to be the sort that automatically start when a phone is restarted... all-in-all a fairly pointless excercise if you ask me, especially as it involves unnecessarily reformatting a memory card!
I would just debrand the bugger TBH. Nice Generic Nokia firmware always works best 😛
buster wrote:Unless I'm much mistaken, he hasn't got rid of any of the applications, as they are still installed on Z drive (ie. the ROM). All he's done is get rid of the icons, which is simple to achieve by moving unwanted icons to a folder called rubbish, unused, whatever.
AFAIK, the issue was that many of the icons couldn't be moved or deleted.... - but then I obviously haven't played with an E71x, so it's hard to say for sure from this far away!
I have the E71X and used the above method. Unless the software is lying completely after the process a little over 4megs of phone memory was freed up. If it's only removing the icons then they're huge icons.
As an E71x user, I can say I don't care about memory storage freedom. I care about the UI and the User Experience. If ATT and Nokia gave us complete control over the icons, allowing us to move ANY icon ANYWHERE, this wouldn't be a problem (for myself and many of us). This helpful article wouldn't exist.
How cheap is memory these days? If you guys think it's expensive, take a look how well Micron, Spansion, Qumonda, and IMFT are doing. If you can see how well JUST the Samsung memory unit is doing, look at that too. "Bloat" my arse. The bloat isn't existence, the bloat is I have to LOOK at it.
Let the install files stay where they are. That's totally cool. But not letting me move or delete icons at will just stinks.
Now we just need an article that tells us how to move or delete the SHOP icons and the "community" icon in the music player, and it's a done deal, good to go. I'm happy to have a "junk" folder. But I need to be able to fully utilize it!