http://www.mobileindustryreview.com/2010/02/ipadio_ansii_from_nokia_preview.html
Looks like more to follow in the morning - sounds interesting judging from Ewan's sound bite.
Haven't posted here for a bit (was poorly aaaahhhh) but having updated to v2.1 my experience with my N97 has improved - it still crashes occasionally and in first 2 days after update it dropped almost all my calls but for whatever reason that seems to have abated (no it makes no real sense to me apart from where I live seemingly being a marginal 3G reception spot so maybe getting better reception but would imply it's still not coping very well with handoff from 3G to GSM/GPRS ).
Anyway in more detail: the firmware upgrade didn't go that smoothly for me unlike others here and I'm not sure if I coudn't have done the proceedure better. The new firmware was available right from the outset for me so no probs there I backed up on Mem Card OK (although OVI suite wouldn't let me). I then did a reset as now recommended by Nokia I see (bit of a change from them there) and restored my contacts etc (but not settings) then resync'd calendar from Ovi Portal and then set about restoring the random apps that had disappeared. I commented on this before after having to do a rebuild but which apps endure and which get wiped is a bit of a mystery as it seems quite arbitrary to me and I have all 3rd party ones installed on the E: however quite a number of them did go so I did the round of re-downloads and installs.
I've no idea how some of you do it so quickly as that all seems to take me a good three hours plus and redoing all the profile and other small settings etc. The next step was where I ran into real problems when I tried to refresh the music library I received a phone call while it was doing it and nothing I could do would persuade it that there were any tracks stored on the E:. Tried uninstalling them and reinstalling them through OVI suite, tried manually deleting and transferring over in mass storage mode, well you get it, tried every variation I could think of and nothing - even left it 5 hours trying to do the indexing in case I hadn't left it long enough. Ended up reformatting the E: and the did a full reset as well so then had to completely rebuild and download absolutley everything all over again and still couldn't get it to refresh the list of music. In a moment of desperation/inspiration I ended up taking the Micro SD storage out and you guessed it worked just fine, the previous time I had to reset after WSOD I didn't have this problem at all. In all I must've spent over 12hrs on this and goes back to my oft stated contention: Firmware upgrades shouldn't really be encouraged as they're not that simple to perform so Nokia need to DRAMATICALLY improve the release firmwares rather than relying on a series of itterative improvements as they seem to have fallen very much into the habit of over the last few years. Secondly they still need to imrove the seemlessness of the update process it's still far to easy to bork the phone (or seemingly have borked it) it's no good having UDP if the phone's actually require a factory reset to get the firmware upgrade to "take", they need a leaf from Apple's book on this. Why no place to store your App list (assuming it's all from OVI as mine is) with a batch reinstall? (or have I just been and idiot and there is one that I missed :tongue: ?) Some seem perfectly content to put with this behaviour though.
However getting past that, as I said at the beginning the new firmware is an improvement, it's not preefect but is what it could and should have been released with. They've been pretty ruthless with the memory management and I notice that quite frequently when I fire up either the new OVI maps or Web it has closed down most or all of the other apps that were running and Web still crashes or more accurately freezes way too regularly but I think that's really a reflection on the constricted hardware than the OS though failure events should be handled more seemlessly in an ideal world without locking up the OS (pipe dream). All in all it runs more "solidly" can't say it's faster really but seem less moments of uncertainty as to whether it's going to do anything or not. Talking of the hardware problems after the Maps update and as I'm using Nokia Messaging and have couple of other Nokia Apps installed (Point and Find etc) I am in a bit of trouble with the C: now (23-24 MB) generally but seems to stablize in that zone without falling further but obviously that's it for any more Nokia programmes for me (which is a bit silly on what was sold as a power flagship) as they all seem to install on the C: and I have already rerun the memory reorganizer several times and it isn't making any real difference any more I really do have everything I can control installed on the E: .
I'll be very interested to see what this senior Nokia executive has to say as I still contend that the overall ownership experience of this product has been way below what it's �500 price warranted. Frankly the 5800 has got the same hardware platform barring the Camera and Mass Storage and seems to have offered a much better cost/benefit ownership ratio and I think those like me who feel that they've bought into a poor product that's been poorly supported have a good argument.
1) The Hardware platform wasn't sufficient for purpose - even Steve Litchfield (hardly known as a Nokia basher) contends this is so and I suspect Rafe is about to put the same point across too - for the sake of a few dollars and some foresight or allowing for future expansion would have saved months trying to get underpowered hardware to cope with overbloated demands made on it. Even now the best way they have been able to stabilize it seemingly is to stop it doing too much multitasking ie making it ruthless when running some apps.
2) Taking from July to February the following year to actually get the OS into a state it's fit for public use is just not acceptable. By this I mean not having to make allowances along the "Oh it Only crashes if I ask it to do this........or it only crshaes intermittently" which are just not acceptable. A highend SmartPHONE should just work, every time, always, end of. It's fine for a platform such as the N900 to be a work in progress when it was advertised as such; the N97 wasn't and it simply didn't work reliably or deliver the services it was advertised with. Now I think it's particularly stupid given that it wasn't exactly quick to market after Dec 2008 announcement and that it was running pretty much the same stuff as 5800. Which is why following reviews that certainly didn't warn of it's huge early problems (and AAS were as, if not more guilty of this as many others) I think many felt safe to buy it, it wasn't until the waves of user feedback came in that alarm bells started to sound. Too late for many of us by then and I wasn't an early adopter. I still think many of the problems can be attributed to the first failing with the hardware.
3) Nokia didn't either acknowledge that there were problems or what steps were going to be taken to rectify them in a timely or professional manner. This is a fairly common fault but even after the last shreds of plausible deniablilty have be torn form them they still haven't been fully open about the Cam/GPS problems or indeed about the legion of software problems and which are fixable and in how long and which are not.
Again none of this adds up to a �500 phone experience.
Any early N97 owners fancy buying SF^3 devices hot off the presses or maybe not? Which is a shame - especially for me as a shareholder LOL so yar boo sucks to me the Nokia "hater"