I agree matey the world is not perfect and the odd bug with a new phone is only to be expected. However there's a difference between a product that's new and has a few bugs that need ironing out and a phone that's new and basically has that many problems it should not be on sale.
I understand what you are saying and yes nothing is perfect and I don't expect the N86 to be perfect. But I do expect it to work.
The Nokia N86 wins the race to v20 firmware
So your main problems are crashes, poor battery life and a non-functioning FM tranmitter? I've never had a crash but do switch off each night. Battery life is good too - far better than the Windoze phones I've been using recently. I'm a power user (lots of messages, emails & music in particular) and can last two days. As for the fm transmitter, assuming you have the option to start it (not all variants do), what exactly happens? If it's not a hardware fault I would recommend upgrading to V20 and doing a master reset. For me, a major annoyance is the music player un-pausing itself after a phone call but that's rectified by exiting the player after use.
quattroporte wrote:So your main problems are crashes, poor battery life and a non-functioning FM tranmitter? I've never had a crash but do switch off each night. Battery life is good too - far better than the Windoze phones I've been using recently. I'm a power user (lots of messages, emails & music in particular) and can last two days. As for the fm transmitter, assuming you have the option to start it (not all variants do), what exactly happens? If it's not a hardware fault I would recommend upgrading to V20 and doing a master reset. For me, a major annoyance is the music player un-pausing itself after a phone call but that's rectified by exiting the player after use.
Music playback starting again after a call is the way it was designed to work and has done for a few years now. Other high end products work similarly. I personally like this especially if you are listening to music in the car or running or walking and device is in your pocket etc.. Are you sure you would prefer this to be changed for some future product or am I missing something?
DamianDinning wrote:Music playback starting again after a call is the way it was designed to work and has done for a few years now. Other high end products work similarly. I personally like this especially if you are listening to music in the car or running or walking and device is in your pocket etc.. Are you sure you would prefer this to be changed for some future product or am I missing something?
In your example it should work as you described. But in my case, which happened in the office today, I paused the music to attend a meeting. An hour later, I had a call which I answered. The music started up when I hung up and now everyone knows I'm into Jethro Tull..... So ideally, if the music was paused by the incoming call, it should resume after the call. If the music was already paused before the call, it should remain paused after the call.
Incidentally I managed to find time to leave the office at lunch time today and snap a few photos. I am very happy with the results. For those whose shots end up blurry the key thing is to hold the phone as still as possible when squeezing the shutter release (which in my opinion is a little too stiff). I find that using my middle finger on the shutter release works best as this allows the phone to rest on my right palm. I then use as much of my thumb and 1st finger on the left hand as I can to literally brace the phone against the right hand. Then it's a case of gently squeezing.
I then use as much of my thumb and 1st finger on the left hand as I can to literally brace the phone against the right hand
@quattroporte
this is a perfect strategy to avoid shaking, just tried it and it works perfect. :icon14:
so you avoid pressing down on the right side.
Thank you for this information
Best wishes Mav
quattroporte wrote:In your example it should work as you described. But in my case, which happened in the office today, I paused the music to attend a meeting. An hour later, I had a call which I answered. The music started up when I hung up and now everyone knows I'm into Jethro Tull..... So ideally, if the music was paused by the incoming call, it should resume after the call. If the music was already paused before the call, it should remain paused after the call.
Take your point in that case.
Instead of pausing the music in your 'going into meeting' example. Have you tried stopping instead? That should completely overcome the problem, right?
DamianDinning wrote:Take your point in that case.Instead of pausing the music in your 'going into meeting' example. Have you tried stopping instead? That should completely overcome the problem, right?
It would, but that defeats the purpose of having the option to pause music and resume it at a later time.
I think the issue many people have with bugs such as these is that they are not present in previous models and/or models with lower specs; if the N86 is being positioned as a refined N95/N82, why do bugs exist that haven't cropped up in past devices? I understand that no device will be perfect, but there has just been such a long gap between the N86 and say, the N85, for it not to run superb out of the box. Granted, there are more technical issues at play here and there is a huge difference in the HW/SW interaction than previous devices, but to the common guy, it just doesn't make sense to spend ~$450 USD on such a device just because it says Nokia and has an 8MP camera...when it doesn't work or contains bugs.
My N86 has few issues if any (thank goodness my retailer allowed me to have a replacement), but I could never recommend it to people who want a premium phone that works well. Further, there are just too many other solutions in the current smartphone landscape to recommend a device that does not get updates in a timely manner to rectify such bugs.
Off topic, yet related:
I am fully aware of the logistical issues that Nokia faces since they offer many, many devices with many, many variants, but this all means nothing to the end user who simply wants their device to work and who wants the same support that others are already receiving. If Nokia can't offer the same level of attention to market X, I personally believe they have no business being involved in market X in the first place. Perhaps reaching too far spreads resources too thin.
Well said Newtype!! At the end of the day this phone costs about �400 here in the uk, that's a lot of money for a phone and to release a phone of this value with this many bugs is, well, just not good enough.
I won't be buying Nokia again.
I too now finally am a proud owner of N86 , I am from India ,Mumbai to be specefic.
Finally purchased the phone last sunday. I have been closely following this thread for some time now, and my judgement was that this phone has more positives going for it and only a few specific minor negatives.
I loved the image quality of the phone, its simple amazing, I am not a professional photographer and mostly the images I take are used just for uploading on facebook/orkut and for viewing them on my laptop, and for these purposes the phone is really amazing, no complains.
I compared the photos taken from this phone with those taken by a 8.2MP Sony digicam after they were uploaded on the sites such as Facebook and orkut, and beleive me no one can spot the difference between the two. Obviously one can point out that there would be diiferences in terms of noice when the images are viewed at their full resolutions , but even then there is not much difference. In any case how many of us really see images in full 8MP resolution every time.
I have also upgarded the FW to v20, and got those additional camera features such as face detection and improved auto focus.
The only thing which this cell did not have was 3G, thats a real disappoinment, I mean this is an expensive piece of work, Rs 24,000 here in India so atleast 3G could have been added when its already there in several other models such as Samsung Star 3G which only costs Rs 10,000. Other than this I think the phone absolutely rocks. :icon14:
I totally agree with alans27 and newtype. When I bought my N95-1 two years ago, I admitted having issues with an innovative device that needed polishing. Today, after many models based on a similar hardware and software architecture, It's more difficult to admit having so many issues with a device such as the N86.
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DamianDinning wrote:Take your point in that case.Instead of pausing the music in your 'going into meeting' example. Have you tried stopping instead? That should completely overcome the problem, right?
You could have also suggested him to use 3rd party mp3 player, but that's not the point 😉
We can get around the problem, but it doesn't mean it shouldn't be fixed anyway... Pause option becomes worthless if you can't use it because there is no way to know when you'll get a call which will un-pause it
Manugarekar wrote:
The only thing which this cell did not have was 3G, thats a real disappoinment, I mean this is an expensive piece of work, Rs 24,000 here in India so atleast 3G could have been added when its already there in several other models such as Samsung Star 3G which only costs Rs 10,000. Other than this I think the phone absolutely rocks. :icon14:
Is it some India related thing (that it doesn't have 3G/has it locked) or am I not understanding something here..?
Manugarekar wrote:{snipped}The only thing which this cell did not have was 3G, thats a real disappoinment, I mean this is an expensive piece of work, Rs 24,000 here in India so atleast 3G could have been added when its already there in several other models such as Samsung Star 3G which only costs Rs 10,000. Other than this I think the phone absolutely rocks. :icon14:
Am I too missing something...?
The Nokia N86 has QUAD band GSM, as well full TRI band 3G - most other phones only contain DUAL band 3G, so the Nokia N86 in this regard is BETTER than a lot of other phones.
So what exactly are you trying to tell us mate, and we can maybe help...?
Hi,
I just got my new N86, its a beautiful phone to use, but since i got the software update i cant use the bbci player and some video content doesnt work, it says ''cannot play ausio or video, attempting to play the file seperatly'' or something along those lines, then the file plays the audio only, how can i fix this?
e-mail [email][email protected][/email] not sure if ill get back here anytime soon
Thanx
Dale
Since I updated firmware to v20 on my N86, the GPS performance of the phone seems very poor. I'm unable to get a GPS lock from places where I had no such trouble earlier. When GPS is activated I get the message "Waiting for GPS" which then changes to "No connection" in a couple of seconds. With the earlier firmware, this never used to happen and I used to get a GPS lock within 2 or 3 minutes. And ofcourse, as posted by someone earlier, we could see the satellite status with the earlier firmware. Request Nokia people to look into the GPS issue before the next firmware update.
lukpot wrote:You could have also suggested him to use 3rd party mp3 player, but that's not the point 😉
We can get around the problem, but it doesn't mean it shouldn't be fixed anyway... Pause option becomes worthless if you can't use it because there is no way to know when you'll get a call which will un-pause it
Exactly. It just happened to me at my work - the music player was paused and somebody called me. After I finished talking on the phone, the player started at full loudness and made me look stupid.
I completely agree with lukpot - with this bug, the pause option is completely useless.
DamianDinning wrote:Big apologies for the delay, we are working on the issue. I won't go into the details but suffice to say that we had high confidence the first round of NSU updates would be available last week. Unfortunately we were unable to meet this in the end as you now know. I have my fingers crossed later this week for 1st round variant updates but am unable to guarantee it.If yours is not in this 1st round we'll bring it as quickly as we can, but the process does take time. I appreciate this can be frustrating but is way more complicated than it sounds on the surface. If you have already tried FOTA and it says the update is not available the chances are that your variant code will not be available via NSU this week either. The exact schedule for other variants other than those released already via FOTA I am unable to comment further at this stage.
Please be assured we are doing everything we can to get the updates to you as quickly as possible.
br
Hi Damian.
Any update to the 1st round variant FW updates? Checked NSU and nada.
Another man's meat is another man's poison. Basically, for me, the music player un-pausing bug is annoying but remembering to close the music player after use is an acceptable solution.
Perhaps it's because I come from Windows Mobile where OS crashes when answering a call are not un-heard of (happened to me twice in fact), but after nearly two weeks into N86 ownership I continue to be amazed by the following (in no particular order):
* The camera. As good as I'd hoped it would be.
* A proper, multi-tasking OS and general stability. It tickles me when I see reviewers commenting that Symbian is a little long in the tooth. As a previous Psion user (5MX) I don't disagree. However, isn't Linux getting on a bit too? In fact I think it pre-dates EPOC by a number of years. Symbian works and it works well!
* The build quality. Yes, there's some play in my slider if I look carefully - but I'd expect there to be.
* Nokia's email messaging service. Dang, this was dead easy to setup and works really well. I have it pushing email to my phone from four accounts. I hope they don't start charging for it. It could be the thing that keeps me as a Nokia user for years to come.
* Ovi - still some polishing work to be done on this but I've already started using it instead of Google to sync my calendar and contacts. Again, it's the ease of setup that swayed it for me - setting up Google to work with Exchange is a pain. I'm also using now Ovi Conversations which works with Google Talk where most of my contacts hang out (all three of them!)
* GPS / Built-in Compass / Ovi Maps - Wow. I can see this will come in handy the next time I'm lost overseas (will pre-load maps before I travel).
* The general usability of the phone / user interface - given that the functions of the phone run so deep, I reckon the UI does an admirable job.
* N-Gage - I'm not really much of a gamer but the fact this is included on the phone is kinda neat. I will download the Guitar Hero trial at some stage, just to annoy my son who plays it on his Xbox.
* Battery Life - way ahead of the recent smart phone I've owned.
* FM Transmitter - not having a line-in on my car stereo, this is seeing regular use.
As I said before, for me, this baby hits the right buttons :icon14:
Unregistered wrote:Hi Damian.Any update to the 1st round variant FW updates? Checked NSU and nada.
I gave up waiting for V20 - my N86 was stuck with V10. I think the operator hadn't authorized the upgrade or something... Could be the same case with you... So I switched to Euro 1, upgraded to V11 via NSU and then to V20 (a much smaller download) via OTA.
quattroporte wrote:Another man's meat is another man's poison. Basically, for me, the music player un-pausing bug is annoying but remembering to close the music player after use is an acceptable solution.Perhaps it's because I come from Windows Mobile where OS crashes when answering a call are not un-heard of (happened to me twice in fact), but after nearly two weeks into N86 ownership I continue to be amazed by the following (in no particular order):
* The camera. As good as I'd hoped it would be.
[...]
* FM Transmitter - not having a line-in on my car stereo, this is seeing regular use.
As I said before, for me, this baby hits the right buttons :icon14:
I fully agree, in my opinion N86 is the best smartphone up till now. I have been waiting since 2005 to get an all-in-one symbian smartphone and now I'm really satisfied with it (i bought it one week ago). Frankly, I have never used a smartphone with such great audio quality and such a good camera. And I didn't notice any software/hardware problems up till now.
But the music player bug is a nasty one. Ok, there is a solution for it. But a new N86 owner does not know about the bug - it can happen that he makes a fool out of himself ...
@DamianDinning - do you think this music player bug could be solved with the new firmware version?
regarding battery indicator issue:
This is my second day, took it off the charger yesterday morning, battery shows full 7 bars, didn't restart my phone, didn't top-up my battery, however iON Battery shows 69% strength 😕
I understand that there is always "accuracy issue" as I installed it yesterday and it needs 5 full charging/discharging cycles for best accuracy, but still!
To avoid misunderstandings, I'm not complaining about battery life performance, but strictly to totally inaccurate battery indicator.
When I try to delete captured image as soon as side bar pop up I get this (not always but very often):
Quite annoying!
As for my "ovi tab" in Contacts:
Maybe this is theme related, don't know if you've experienced similar issue? But I get this tab messed up (no OVI name, just that white square) sometimes even with default Nokia Indigo theme.
Cheers,
Miki
Miki, your 2 and 3 don't happen on mine. Are you on V20? Have you tried a hard reset (though I know how painful they are...)
I just remembered another mild annoyance - I have four email accounts and, because the standby screen can only display the new emails for one account (my 'main' account), I have to manually check the other 3 in turn whenever an email arrives that isn't for my 'main' account. It would be helpful if the main Email screen could show the number of unread messages in brackets after the mailbox name.
quattroporte wrote:Miki, your 2 and 3 don't happen on mine. Are you on V20? Have you tried a hard reset (though I know how painful they are...)
Yeap, v20, already did hard reset, which brought back my Music icon back (pink one) and resolved my Gallery issue. I also don't recall having this "Already in use" message with v11, but then again I didn't take much shots with v11. As I said it doesn't happen all the time, just when you try to delete captured images as soon as side bar pop up (again, not always but frequently). Solution is to wait a sec or two and then delete image, which is honestly speaking not a big deal, just wanted to know why this error pop up. I've never experienced such message with my 6720 when trying to "fast delete" images, so I think it has something to do with N86 SW.
Cheers,
Miki
quattroporte wrote:I gave up waiting for V20 - my N86 was stuck with V10. I think the operator hadn't authorized the upgrade or something... Could be the same case with you... So I switched to Euro 1, upgraded to V11 via NSU and then to V20 (a much smaller download) via OTA.
Quattropotre, i'm on the Euro 1 product code and v20 is already available for me OTA, but i'd prefer to update via NSU. But i'm still waiting for that to happen as on NSU it says v11 is still my current FW.
greenender wrote:@DamianDinning - do you think this music player bug could be solved with the new firmware version?
So without wishing to be seen as argumentative here's how I see this:
case 1: I'm listening to music and call comes in. Music paused automatically. Call finishes and music starts again. This is common prefered way of working.
case 2: I'm listening to music and stop music due to a task. In this case using stop but not exiting the music player will mean that you can return to your music collection at exactly the same point later on but will mean that the song will sytart from the beginning. Is it really important that you return some hours later to exactly the same point in a track? I'm finding it hard as this case is decribed at least to udnerstand if this is a big issue and why - help me here please.
case 3: as 1 but at the end of the call you decide to stop listening to music. currently you would need to stop the music during the call (press stop in music player) or stop music after the call. If in this case you would prefer it not to start playing music at the end of the call having been listening to music when the call came in would mean we would break case 1 which I think would mean making life worse for the majority of cases to benefit less occuring case.
case 4: ? open to you.
If my understanding is correct of the above cases I don' t see what there is to change but no doubt you'll put me straight 😊
atb
miki69 wrote:Yeap, v20, already did hard reset, which brought back my Music icon back (pink one) and resolved my Gallery issue. I also don't recall having this "Already in use" message with v11, but then again I didn't take much shots with v11. As I said it doesn't happen all the time, just when you try to delete captured images as soon as side bar pop up (again, not always but frequently). Solution is to wait a sec or two and then delete image, which is honestly speaking not a big deal, just wanted to know why this error pop up. I've never experienced such message with my 6720 when trying to "fast delete" images, so I think it has something to do with N86 SW.Cheers,
Miki
Miki on this already in use issue you're experiencing (which we are yet to see ourselves I believe which makes life more complex) is this when you have red-eye flash mode in use? If so it I'm wondering if this is connected to the longer background processing in that mode, but not seen the issue in that mode either. Do you have any other sharing client like shozu or similar installed?
DamianDinning wrote:Miki on this already in use issue you're experiencing (which we are yet to see ourselves I believe which makes life more complex) is this when you have red-eye flash mode in use? If so it I'm wondering if this is connected to the longer background processing in that mode, but not seen the issue in that mode either. Do you have any other sharing client like shozu or similar installed?
I was wandering the same 😊 (about that flash on/off). All I can tell you is it DOES happen more often when flash is ON (either ON or automatic), I haven't tried "red-eye" flash at all. But it also happens with flash OFF, kind of "no rules".
I don't have any clients installed at all, in fact I have only few apps (like X-plore, Y browser, JbakTaskman (not active), that battery meter (also not active), but I guess none of them are related to camera function. I have 55-57MB RAM free, 50.7MB C drive free (if it means anything)
Can check with your technician guys, what triggers this message? As this is system "error message", so it must be related to something (some unfinished process or similar)
As for my battery indicator, it went down 1 bar (6 bars left), 59% battery strength according to iON Battery Timer, though the system reports 85% battery strength (Jbak Taskman).
Cheers,
Miki
DamianDinning wrote:So without wishing to be seen as argumentative here's how I see this:case 1: I'm listening to music and call comes in. Music paused automatically. Call finishes and music starts again. This is common prefered way of working.
case 2: I'm listening to music and stop music due to a task. In this case using stop but not exiting the music player will mean that you can return to your music collection at exactly the same point later on but will mean that the song will sytart from the beginning. Is it really important that you return some hours later to exactly the same point in a track? I'm finding it hard as this case is decribed at least to udnerstand if this is a big issue and why - help me here please.
case 3: as 1 but at the end of the call you decide to stop listening to music. currently you would need to stop the music during the call (press stop in music player) or stop music after the call. If in this case you would prefer it not to start playing music at the end of the call having been listening to music when the call came in would mean we would break case 1 which I think would mean making life worse for the majority of cases to benefit less occuring case.
case 4: ? open to you.
If my understanding is correct of the above cases I don' t see what there is to change but no doubt you'll put me straight 😊
atb
Thank you very much for responding 😊
Case 1:
- it's perfect like it is. In my opinion this is expected - the call interrupted your listening to music, so it should resume after the call.
Case 3:
- I think it is perfect like it is.
Let me explain case 2, as I see it.
I work at the office, as a programmer/analyst. Now when I have my new nokia, I'm using it for listening music when I'm at my desk - using headphones. It happens often during the day, that somebody asks me something (comes to my desk for instance). Then I pause the player for a short period of time (few seconds, one minute, sometimes more). Then I'm unpausing it and continue listening.
That's perfect. But sometimes somebody comes for help and I have to go with him to his desk. Then I'm unplugging the headphones and take my N86 with me, because somebody may call me. And If I forgot to stop the player, the player will resume using loudspeakers and makes some noise. This is not a big issue. I can stop the player every time I'm unplugging the headphones. It's a bit annoying, but I just have to remember about it.
In the extreme case, when somebody is interrupted many times during the day, for a short period of time, he has to stop the player everytime and then start from the beginning.
To sum it up: It's a minor issue. But it is annoying.
On the other hand, N86 firmware is great, because (as I see it) it has only few minor bugs (or even "unexpected features"😉 like this one. I have used symbian nokias for years, I wrote some symbian apps for them in the past - and I always thought that they are the best smartphones on the market.
Just let me ask you just two more questions:
1) Do you agree, that "un-pausing the player after the call, if it was paused manually before the call" is not an expected behavior?
2) Is it really a big deal to fix this ? Now the system un-pauses the player after each call.
Would it be difficult to store information, if the player was paused _before_ the call, and then use this information to decide if the player should be resumed after the call?
greenender wrote:Thank you very much for responding 😊Case 1:
- it's perfect like it is. In my opinion this is expected - the call interrupted your listening to music, so it should resume after the call.Case 3:
- I think it is perfect like it is.Let me explain case 2, as I see it.
I work at the office, as a programmer/analyst. Now when I have my new nokia, I'm using it for listening music when I'm at my desk - using headphones. It happens often during the day, that somebody asks me something (comes to my desk for instance). Then I pause the player for a short period of time (few seconds, one minute, sometimes more). Then I'm unpausing it and continue listening.
That's perfect. But sometimes somebody comes for help and I have to go with him to his desk. Then I'm unplugging the headphones and take my N86 with me, because somebody may call me. And If I forgot to stop the player, the player will resume using loudspeakers and makes some noise. This is not a big issue. I can stop the player every time I'm unplugging the headphones. It's a bit annoying, but I just have to remember about it.
In the extreme case, when somebody is interrupted many times during the day, for a short period of time, he has to stop the player everytime and then start from the beginning.
To sum it up: It's a minor issue. But it is annoying.
On the other hand, N86 firmware is great, because (as I see it) it has only few minor bugs (or even "unexpected features"😉 like this one. I have used symbian nokias for years, I wrote some symbian apps for them in the past - and I always thought that they are the best smartphones on the market.
Just let me ask you just two more questions:
1) Do you agree, that "un-pausing the player after the call, if it was paused manually before the call" is not an expected behavior?2) Is it really a big deal to fix this ? Now the system un-pauses the player after each call.
Would it be difficult to store information, if the player was paused _before_ the call, and then use this information to decide if the player should be resumed after the call?
Ok, thanks I fully understand your point now.
Honestly speaking I don't know the answer to question 2. What I can say though ibased on experience s that often aspects which seem straightforward on the surface are way more complex when you get into them. It's good to understand the scale of the issue though before you go opening the cans...
Let me ask some questions, but no promises...
atb
D
Hi Damian.
Any update to the 1st round variant FW updates? Checked NSU and nada.