I upgraded my phone to a Nokia N95 8GB Comes With Music in March this year. I did A LOT of research and as others have said about the previous N95, this phone does everything I want. I was even prepared to pay �400 for it halfway through a contract. I can see it lasting me five years minimum. This is the first phone I have ever wanted to keep long term. All upgrade phones are going to be sold on from now on. Even the new iPhone doesn't have as good a camera/video camera and cannot do any kind of file handling or document editing. I can also use my Nokia on my existing Orange contract. And I can download 60 million plus tracks to listen to on it. Just the job.
I like my old phone, so why should I upgrade?
I'm posting this on every Symbian-related website I know (thanks, Nokia Discussions for erasing my post!!):
it seems that if you unbrand your N97 with the lastest Nemesis and then you upgrade it, it will hang!
No problem with other unbranding softwares...
I have gone through a few handsets in recent months while last year I also experimented.
Last year I was looking for an upgrade from my N82 (after previously having an N93, N95, N95 8GB, I sampled WM with the Touch Diamond and the Omnia i900 and it didn't take me long to realise just how poor WM is an OS. I also played with Samsungs G810 (a phone that had the potential to be better than the N95) and the Innov8 both of which were although with great hardware were a huge letdown. In the end I got a 5800 at the end of the year and held that side by side with the N82.
This year with my primary phone being the 5800 but the N82 still IMO the best non touch smartphone out there I tried out a few more. So far I have had an N86, i8910, N97 and none of them yet can convince me that they are worth me signing up to another 18 months. Although the N86 has made huge huge strides for me it is an upgrade to the N95 not the N82, I think the N82 aside from the MPIX difference isn't far behind the N86 and I couldn't justify paying an extra �10 a months on my tarrif to have it. The N97 for me aside from being physically appealing and mechanically very sound is a letdown on the camera front and for that to be free I would have to pay an extra �15 a months on my contract, I will stick with the 5800 thanks very much. The i8910 was unique, at the same price as the N97 I got it and loved A LOT of things about it, the screen is sublime, the camera while not as good as the Innov8 is pretty good, the video record resolution is its selling point but the audio lets that down (fix will be around in coming months), all in all this is the closest I got but for an active person who uses my phone for sports and fitness having this huge phone in my pocket was not good for me. For everyday use the 5800 is perfect even for a phone geek like me and the N82 gives me all I need as a backup or when I go out at night.
i agree to the core opinion here, that new devices are not "new" enough in terms of functionality to give your brain a hard time to decide whether or not to buy a new phone.
i am pretty new to the symbian stuff but it had a great influence on me since my first symbian phone that now is 6 month old. end of last year i decided to put my good old SE K800i to rest to buy something new. the advertisements totally got me and i wanted to get the next best cam phone (back in the days the SE K800i was the best cam phone, so i was just reestablishing my phone status). i bought the SE C905 because of it's nice 8 MPixel cam and the xenon flash. i compared it to the sony compact digicam (6mp) and my phone was superior in some lightning enviroments. the excitement of having a new phone and playing with it day in day out probably lasted 2 or 3 days. what can you do with a phone with proprietary operating system ... but back then i did not know symbian.
fate wanted the c905 to fade away after just 3 month of usage so i decided to bring it back to the shop i bought it and get another phone. a bit smarter now i did search the internet about errors and production fault reports in the net. i found my new target, the samsung i8510 innov8. same camera but no flash but it was getting got reviews so i gave it a shot.
without actually knowing that it has symbian i got to know and love the vast possibilities you got with S60v3 and i really like this phone.
there was a huge difference regarding the period of time i did feel like having a new toy. with the sony-ericsson c905 i had that feeling for a few days, but with this really great symbian device the initial euphoria lasted at least 3 weeks and is still not totally gone, because you have so many things to tweak and customize.
no to come to the point (yeah, i do have difficulties to get to the point, often totally forgetting to write it) the new handsets with symbian S60v5 are just not even on the level the s60v3 is. not only because s60v3 is more stable (has to be after all those years), but also in terms of applications i would fall back from an open market of more than a thousand applications to choose from (for s60v3) to a market of perhaps 10 useful applications for the s60v5 plattform.
these are disadvantages that are only logical for a new plattform, but when it is not the plattform that will make me change my innov8 for a newer device, than it has to be the hardware specifications. sadly nokia go on a very conservative way so the n97 would be more of step back than an upgrade for me.
i now focussed on the samsung i8910 hd and since they got the audio sorted (changed to aac with higher bitrate) while recording in 1280x720 resolution i think i might give it a shot. the only thing that really is holding me back right now is the price tag (500€ for better video recording ?????) and the lack of applications for s60v5.
if these things do improve over the next few month i will change my phone after just half a year or so, if not, i will still be happy with this great symbian phone called innov8
don't see me as a samsung fanboy, because i am not. i was a sony-ericsson fanboy and just converted to someone who does not like one manufacturer better then another.
back then i even had the coolest phone on earth (for my thinking) with the nokia 7110 witht he cool track"ball" thingie to scroll in sms messages.
the operating system just has to be fluid and not hinder the user... new colours are always nice and gimmicks are nice to see once or twice but just like windows vista, s60v5 is not mature enough to challenge people to buy a new phone, when the hardware is not a huge improvement over the still owned mobile phone.