sorry guys I jumped ship after my 2nd N97 in 3 weeks with problems.
Well my second handset that I had only had for 2 days decided it was going to play up, crashing and not connecting to Orange so I decided I was going back to CPW to see what they said. I said it had V10 firmware and that V11 may help and the technician there told me that just because it was a higher number did not mean it was a newer version, they only had V10 so I was offered a 3rd unit or for the one I had to be sent away for at least 2 weeks to be updated, well I was not happy with the solution offered to me and I spoke to Carphone Warehouse CS and ended up on the phone to the 2nd line team.
well I no longer own an N97 and now own a HTC Hero for better or for worse!
good luck guys, maybe the phone will work as we all wanted one day
Good luck with the new phone - I may well be jumping onto the Android ship after the N97, money talks and it's the only language Nokia seem to understand.
I don't blame you mate. I will be doing the same thing come October. Going to buy a simfree iphone when I visit HongKong.
I do like my N97, the keyboard makes texting a doddle, and I love the brightness and size of the screen.
But there's just too many bugs that are annoying me:icon13:
If I wasn't going to lose so much money, I'd probably be off too!
i'll hang on in there for a little while longer, but only because i haven't had the camera problems - my need is for better firmware and much more software applications to play with.
they've got us by the short and curlys. Hoping for a firmware update myself.
Wish I'd taken a punt on the new iphone.
Beside my 3 weeks old N97 I also still own my old(10 months) HTC touchHD, and in 3 days I'll take delivery of an HTC Hero.
Then I'll really have to decide which phone to get rid of.
I can (barely) justify 2 smartphones with the excuse that one is for work and the other for private use , but the 3d is impossible to justify even to myself, and makes me feel kind of silly too.
Which of the 3 do you guys would suggest me to abandon?
I don't know if I have been specially lucky or just more crafty, but until now I managed to fix all the (numerous) bugs and letdowns which the N97 had when it came out of its box and Nokia Denmark promised me that if I will send them my unit for a week they will fix a few minor problems too, so I'll do that when I'll be back from my holydays and see what happens then.
One quick suggestion: do you know that big chunks of telefon memory are to be gained if you uninstall apps you dont need? For the moment I uninstalled only Amazon and the gain was immediate, but there is lots more of useless crapware I have decided to uninstall when Ill need more mem.
One more suggestion: get rid of the drab and boring UI of the N97 by installing a nice Theme: a pleasant UI does much to render more enjoyable the use of your phone.
Just google "free themes for N97 " and you will find 1000s.
its a shame the N97 turned into such a buggy device, My N95 was OK but I could not risk the N97 for 2 years.
So far the Hero is pretty nice and nippy and very iPhone like, its still not perfect but is much better than the N97 was.
TBH the iPhone is so slick its untrue, but its not on orange and I'm stuck now for 2 years! grrr...
we got very different opinions Jamminjp.
I had an iPhone 3G and I gave it back 4 or5 (can't remeber exactly) days after because of the huge letdown it was .
I could'nt use it as modem with my netbook (VaioTT), no front facing camera so no videocalls, no voice dialling (necessary for every driver), no video shooting, no flash support, etc etc.
Some of these things have been fixed on the 3GS, but apart for the camera all the fixes are pretty lame, the voice commands , for exemple are a bad joke compared to the equivalent Nokia app. and tethering is impossible if you run windows.
Last but not least I can't stand iTunes and its DRM , and I can stand even less that Apple should decide what I must or must not install on my phone.
My best friend got one of those 3GS because he thought was slick too andnow he's desperate to get rid of it without loosing too much.
Remember that the dearth of phone memory can esily be resolved by uninstalling some crapware (do you really need Hi5 or Youku or Amazon ,all of which are installed by Nokia on phone memory?)
Remember that the horrible Nokia UI can be beautyfied for free (install a theme called "Water - by Delik), and that Nokia promised that all the N97 sent in for service will have the camera lens cover substituted with the one from the N86 and the memory repartitioned.
If you still want to divorce from your N97 I think that at the moment only a handful of devices can compete with it and they are:
Samsung OmniaHD (which I did'nt buy because I was disappointed by my old Omnia 900i and because it looked too similar to my HTC touchHD), HTC touchPro2 or HTC touchHD (which I have and still love after nearly 10 month), or (I hope) the HTC Hero (which I should get in 2 or 3 days).
Plus there are a couple of phone that I have never seen and are not sold in the frigid lands of Scandinavia where I live, and they are the Palm Pr� (whose looks I profoundly dislike) and the Toshiba TG01 (whose specs are impressing but wich I have seen only on a few pics).
Well these are my opinions on the smartphones that I have , I have had, or I have had occasion to try, but belive me: if you can tweak a little your N97 it's gonna get as good as any of them.
Maybe only the OmniaHD gets out of the box in much better conditions for use, but I know for experience with my old Omnia 900i , that Samsung updates are gonna be very few and far between and that their customer support is the worst in the industry, while Nokia constantly updates all its softwares.
Now , of course the choice is yours.
I'm going to bed (quite happy of the way I tweaked my N97 to serve my needs and tastes).😃
plexus wrote:
Remember that the horrible Nokia UI can be beautyfied for free (install a theme called "Water - by Delik), and that Nokia promised that all the N97 sent in for service will have the camera lens cover substituted with the one from the N86 and the memory repartitioned.
Do you have any evidence to back this up, or is it just wishful thinking? :con?
We have a forum member who has taken their N97s with defective lens cover to a Nokia care point and they have just replaced it with another of the same design that is already scratching the lens, see here:
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/forum//forum/thread/86731/
Here's another new Qwerty enabled, web browsing smartphone with a 5MP camera and GPS from Nokia:
http://thesymbianblog.com/2009/08/08/leaked-images-of-nokias-new-internet-tablet
celios wrote:Do you have any evidence to back this up, or is it just wishful thinking? :con?We have a forum member who has taken their N97s with defective lens cover to a Nokia care point and they have just replaced it with another of the same design that is already scratching the lens, see here:
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/forum//forum/thread/86731/
The evidence I have is that these are the very words that the employee at Nokia hot line Denmark said to me.
I have'nt sent it in for repairs yet because I'm leaving for holidays next friday and I want the phone with me, but in 2 weeks , as soon as I'll be back, I'm gonna send it in to Nokia and then I'll be able to tell you how well or how awfully they fixed my N97.
To be honest I'm pretty intrigued myself.
plexus wrote:The evidence I have is that these are the very words that the employee at Nokia hot line Denmark said to me.
I have'nt sent it in for repairs yet because I'm leaving for holidays next friday and I want the phone with me, but in 2 weeks , as soon as I'll be back, I'm gonna send it in to Nokia and then I'll be able to tell you how well or how awfully they fixed my N97.
To be honest I'm pretty intrigued myself.
Ok, so no evidence. Unless I count the word of anonoymous internet posters' experience of a Nokia call centre as evidence 🙄
I found this posting from the owner and admin of the longstanding my-symbian site very telling about the N97. Especially the last paragraph:
http://my-symbian.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=366588#366588
I'm sorry but I must say that the N97 has really disappointed me to a point that I am switching back to using the 5800 or E90. Not because of its design or its supposed functionality, which are really OK, but because of its current instability and all kinds of small, nasty bugs and issues. I'm too tired with them. When I try to open the Messaging application from the home screen, the screen changes only partially, showing half of the home screen and half of the Messaging screen. I need to touch the slider to make the screen fully refresh. When I open one of the email accounts, and just tap the screen (which on the 5800 invokes the "Check for new email?" requester), on the N97 the Messaging application gets closed and the Home screen pops up. When charging the phone, in the final stage, the phone starts showing "Charging complete" and then again "Charging" some 20 times in a loop, and that's with annoying beeps. Something's still wrong with locking the screen. Sometimes it takes moving the Lock slider several times to get the screen locked or unlocked. And the N97 is the first phone for years that I often find unlocked in my pocket, with some applications started or phone call initiated, so it seems that the autolock function has some issues as well. And, what's the worst of all, the N97 seems to have the worst network signal reception/sensitivity of all phones I've used over the last 2 years. I live in a place with really poor coverage of my network (I'm planning to switch to the other network in a couple of weeks as it has a 100% signal). With other phones, it was really hard to have a normal phone conversation indoors, but it was OK outdoors (backyard, terrace/patio, open window, etc.). Since I started using the N97, I've been unable to normally talk even outdoors. Initially I was wondering if the network signal got even worse when the trees got leaves or for any other reasons but one day I took other phone and voila! everything went back to "normal".... This may not be an issue for people living in places with good network coverage, but in areas with poor network signal it may really prevent you from being able to use the phone... So for now I am switching back to 5800 and I'll wait until these problems get fixed before I touch the N97 again. I'll also hold on with publishing the review, or else it'd have to be a really negative one, probably the first such I ever wrote.
When I read reviews like this I wonder if maybe the user loaded some really bad 3rd party software on the phone. There is really no way to be sure that a piece of software isn't going to have some undesired effect and there is no "certification" of working properly on the N97. Even things from the Ovi Store seem to be suspect!
What is really needed is a bit of diagnostic software running in parallel on the N97 which can send a data dump back to Nokia to help resolve these issues!
Meanwhile all that they have now is a handful of loyal users who try to reliably report and reproduce the problems and offer their observations on what the cause(s) might be. We're unpaid beta testers!
I also wonder with all the world-wide manufacture of the N97, that there weren't some bad batches (my nearly-perfect-working NAM version was made in China).
Either way I don't absolve Nokia from their blunder with this device's premature release.
@rdcinhou, the guy who wrote that is no S60 or Symbian novice, he has been running a site a bit like AAS, since 1999 and has owned just about every Symbian smartphone from the P800 through the Communicators and up to the 5800.
The fact the he appears to be depressed by the current N97 experience is not good.
@ Celios
I don't undersand if you are suspicious of my words or the ones from Nokia Hot Line, in any case why don't you try to call the hotline yourself and see what they tell you?
As for the depressing experience related by the guy who decided to return to his old 5800, I dont know what to say, I guess Ive been luckier than him because the only bug I can complain of in my N97 at the moment (finger crossed), is the slider unlock system that sometimes requires 3 or even 4 slides to unlock (but I never found my phone unlocked in my pocket).
Every time I read of a problem with a N97 I immediatly check and recheck if my unit is affected too but so far I seem to have been spared the horrors I kep hearing of.
Half screens when opening SMS? E-mail problems? MMS and SMS not arriving to the phone? Honestly , when I read this stuff I get the feeling we are using different phones.
I remember that when I bought my HTC touchHD (last november) it was also plagued by a number of annoying bugs, I sent it in for repairs but it did'nt help much.
Then about 3 weeks after I bought it , it fell on the floor and it died.
I brought it back to the shop (avoiding to say that it fell on the floor) that diagnosed a motherboard fault and 3 days later it was substituted by a new unit.
This new unit has been one of the most reliable phones I ever had, so good in fact that I still have it and I can't bring myself to give it away.
On a forum dedicated to the touchHD I often read of people complaining of problems with their touchHD but in about 10 months my second touchHD has been working flawlessly , while my first one was a piece of junk.
One of my pals bought a beautiful Samsung OmniaHD , he's very happy about it and he says that there's nothing at all he could think to complain about it, but if you would read what the specialized forums on that phone say about the bugs, faults and crashes new OmniaHDs suffer from, you would be excused for thinking that samsung released a faulty lemon at an outrageous price.
Of course people write to forums if they are looking for solutions to a problem and not to say that everything is hunky dory, but honestly : do your N97 suffer from all the bugs this guy is writing about?
If your answer is yes then I'm sincerly sorry for you.
Maybe you should consider boycotting your unit , ask for a replacement and hope for a better luck with the second phone.
For the first couple of days I was quite disappointed too by my N97 but now after I fixed it up the way I like (and the way it works) I have begun to really like it.
By the way, any N97 user should try to google " water by Delik" it's free and it's the most beautiful theme I have ever seen for N97 . "Solstice by Pizero" isn't bad either but "Water by Delik" radically changed the S60 UI from horrible to gorgeous.
plexus wrote:@ Celios
I don't undersand if you are suspicious of my words or the ones from Nokia Hot Line, in any case why don't you try to call the hotline yourself and see what they tell you?
I rang them in the UK as soon as I had the problem - they denied there was any such problem and suggested I took it to a Nokia care point (see davecozens experience - they just swap the cover for another with the same problem - not a solution).
As for the depressing experience related by the guy who decided to return to his old 5800, I dont know what to say, I guess Ive been luckier than him because the only bug I can complain of in my N97 at the moment (finger crossed), is the slider unlock system that sometimes requires 3 or even 4 slides to unlock (but I never found my phone unlocked in my pocket).
The guy - Michal Jerz - has reviewed (favourably) just about every significant Symbian based smartphone ever made. He gets review units from Nokia and other manufacturers, and the fact he is negative to this extent about the N97 shocks me to be honest.
You need to ask yourself - where is the AAS review of the N97. It's been 'on the street' for over 7 weeks and still nothing? I wonder why that is...
celios wrote:You need to ask yourself - where is the AAS review of the N97. It's been 'on the street' for over 7 weeks and still nothing? I wonder why that is...
Been wondering that myself.
Today, went out with the family to the park. Couldn't get a signal for love nor money. My wife fired up her Blackberry - no problem at all, got through straight away.
Took a bunch of photos & a video. In the cafe later, showing the photos - every third or fourth photo it kicks me out of the application & back to the homescreen. Yet when I long-press the menu button, 'photos' is still open in the background & lets me back into it. Show a few more photos; and I get kicked out again.
Gonna be a great phone one of these days...:frown:
I don't know, I have been a member of AAS only for a few days, because I bought this N97 about 2 weeks ago (the first day it was for sale in my little frigid country) and I had to hit the interwebs to look for patches and fixes.
I did'nt have Nokias for quite a while.
Ages ago , can't even say how many years have gone since those days, I had a 2110i (on a bright yellow cover) which at the time was the top of the top, and that was my third phone after a couple of motorolas star tac.
I then abandoned Nokia for many years during which I had more phones than I can remember: at least 3, but probably more, Ericssons (at the time not yet married to Sony), a Razr, an LG and maybe some more hat I can't remember.
More recently I have had a Nokia N95 followed by an N95 8gb which I simply loved (must have been a couple of years ago) .
After the N95 8gb I never found a phone that I liked nearly as much for quite a while, I had an HTC touch, an HTC touch pro which I hated and exchanged with a Samsung omnia 900, I had an iPhone 3G also for less than a week (couldnt stand it) and I changed it with an HTC touchHD.
When the N97 was anounced i ran to buy it because of the positive experiences I had with the N95s.
So far I'm pretty happy of it, as I said, for once, I must have got one of the lucky sets; even though the real moment of truth will come only after I will get the phone back from Nokia service.
Tomorrow (hopefully ) I will get my new HTC Hero and I will compare it with my other 2 phones and decide which I can live without.
What about that story of the (faulty) blue plastic cover as opposed to the (good) yellow cover that I have been fed by the guy on Nokia hot line?
Does it sound plausible to you Nokia aficionados or do you think he was he just competing with his bored collegues on who could make the next caller to the hot line eat up the most outrageous story?
i agree with celios
mickey and me have been trying to spread the word over at nokia users and other forums as celios has too
the person you must have spoke to was probably lying lets face it , it wouldnt be the 1st person to lie on the phone would it
vodafone uk havent had a response from nokia yet , nokia are taking handsets back that are damaged from vodafone and examining as we write this thread
there has been no official reply from nokia iam sure vodafone would get one before you mate how many n97s do you think voda have bought and how many do you think that have been returned
pop over to the vodafone e forum and visit the n97 section its quite intresting
their mods over at the forum are very very helpfull indeed
i do agree about a bad batch though i have an early release one and its rubbish , gps , signal , everything is sloppy on it
my friend has one shipped with v11 so obvously a later date one and its very very good , the gps is solid , battery cover dosent creak , touch screen even seems better then my one
my ones gone back and hopefully ill get a good one
Have decided its time to dump the N97, nice phone but too many bugs (left Garmin on for 30 minutes and still couldn't get a lock).
So after some suggestions with which phone to replace it.
Had the Samsung i8510 before this and that was rubbish as well so think its time to stop using Symbian phones.
Any ideas?
TIA
Not looked at the Hero yet but look at the iPhone before getting the N97
:banghead:
Not the best descision I've made!
Looked at the Hero - not sure about the 'chin' design, so the iPhone is looking like the one
(unless I find something else!)
I would warmly suggest the Samsung OmniaHD (S60): I had the occasion of playing with it a few times and it never ceases to amaze me.
Besides the N97 I still have my trusty HTC touchHD and it's a great, stable and extremely versatile phone.
The newer HTC Touch Pro2 is a bettered version of it (much better camera) and it added the best qwerty k-board ever seen on a smartphone.
There is also the HTC Hero , with Android and the new "Sense" UI which I have ordered and I should get this week and which should already be available in Britain.
Finally there is the Toshiba TG01, which sports the fastest processor and the most Ram of all ; of which nobody has ever complainad about and whose praise is universal.
If you can get it it's sure worth considering, unfortunately it's not imported
in Denmark and I have seen it only on a few pics, so I can only relate what I have read about it but the reviews are extremely encouraging.
Anyway, before you totally give up on S60 you should try to take a look at the OmniaHD: You'll be surprised.😊
The reviews of the Samsung OmniaHD do look good and some the info I've seen is from people who have swapped their N97 for the OmniaHD with no complaints.
Does anyone know how the GPS lock on the OmniaHD compares to the N97?
Can't be any worse surely!
I must say that I get a very fast satellite lock on my N97, never more than 30 seconds and often less, but I often have some sorts of "competitions" between my N97 and my pal's OmniaHD, and there is no way to compete with a processor which is more than twice as fast helped by 33% more RAM: his OmniaHD is faster to get a lock not only of my N97 but also of the dedicated GPS unit inbuilt in my car (a Saab cabrio).
Moreover the OmniaHD comes with 2 years subscription to Route66.
My HTC touchHD (with TomTom for win mobile) though is nearly as fast as his OmniaHD
vudluxi wrote:Not looked at the Hero yet but look at the iPhone before getting the N97
:banghead:
Not the best descision I've made!
Looked at the Hero - not sure about the 'chin' design, so the iPhone is looking like the one
(unless I find something else!)
Might be worth looking at this recent article from PC Advisor, entitled, "10 things we hate about the iPhone"
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=120466&pn=1
or this article about the loss of internet services and MMS with O2 that has affected hundreds of thousands of iPhone users:-
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=120534
or this one about overheating handsets:-
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/06/overheating-iphones/
Suddenly the N97 doesn't seem so bad. 😊
Decided to try the OmniaHD, should have it in a couple of days (hopefully), then its onto ebay with the N97!
I agree. I had an iPhone 3G and I hated it.
Luckily I managed to give it back to the shop in exchange for my beloved HTC touchHD (in DK shops are obliged to give you full refound no question asked within 7 working days of purchase and many give 14 days)
I bought it because after playing with it for a few minutes I was charmed by the excellent UI (which is really good) , unfortunately every other aspect of the phone sucks like a tornado.
Could't use it as modem with my netbook, no MMS, no videocalls (no front camera) , no videos, no flash support, terrible reception, buggy sync'ing with windows systems, terrible GPS, no voice dialling (indispensable for drivers), and other crap I now forget.
The new 3GS has fixed only two of these faults:
1) A slightly better camera (3mpx WTF) still useless for vids (no stabilization).
2) Voice dialling ( which according to everybody does not work).
Apparently is also a bit faster.
Not enough to convince me to buy another one.
I specially could'nt stand that you are obliged to use iTunes and its DRM files.
NEVER AGAIN.