Nokia released a firmware upgrade, V 20.2.011, for the US model N95 yesterday. I had no problems installing it on my N95. The process took about 30 minutes; 5 minutes to do a backup with PC Suite, about 20 minutes for Nokia Software Update (now part of PC Suite) to flash the new firmware and another 5 minutes to restore the backup. The process was very smooth and confidence inspiring and I had no problems with the actual upgrade.
Nokia’s backup and restore did a perfect job of puting back contacts, calendar items, notes and messages but it did not restore most of the 3rd party applications I had on the phone. I expected that, having experienced the same thing last time I did a Nokia firmware upgrade. It’s going to take me hours to reinstall the 40 or so applications I had on the phone. Nokia needs to fix this. Something called “Backup” should backup everything and restore should put it all back the way it was.
Several new applications also come bundled with the upgrade. There are N-Gage game demos; FIFA07 (soccer) and Asphalt 3 Street Rules (car racing), Non game additions are Share Online 2.0, Nokia Search and something called MyNokia which says it’s not available in the US when launched.
My gaming is limited to an occasional hand of Solitare so I’m totally unqualified to comment on the games. I did find their graphics and sound impressive with very smooth, fast animation and realistic crowd noises in the soccer game. The soccer demo seems to be limited to ten plays, though. SymbianWeblog has a mini-review of the game demos with lots of screenshots here: FIFA07, Asphalt.
Share Online is Nokia’s answer to Shozu, it adds a Share menu icon to the camera’s in-shot menu to make it easy to immediately upload a photo or video. There doesn’t seem to be an option to automatically upload pictures as soon as you shoot them like you can with Shozu. Upload destinations are limited to Ovi, Flickr and Vox. Shozu can upload to almost any online sharing site or to an email address. Share Online does have one big advantage over Shozu, you can upload files as large as 100MB compared Shozu’s 10MB limit. When shooting videos with the N95, it very easy to exceed 10MB, so the higher limit is much appreciated. Share Online appears on the Active Standby screen where it shows the number of comments you’ve received on each of the three services it supports.
Nokia Search also adds an entry to Active Standby. It lets you search phone content, including music, calendar, notes, messages and applications or start a Yahoo or Microsoft Live (sorry no Google put Google does have there own Active Standby search app for S60) web search. The on phone search is really great if you store everything on your phone like I do.
The upgrade brings the year old model’s software into parity with the new N95 8GB that I’m trialing. Just like the 8GB, it’s got demand paging, Web Run Time, N-Gage support, and Flash Lite 3.0. Upgrading is highly recommended as it improves performance substantially , speeds up the camera and the inclusion of Flash Lite 3 lets you watch Flash videos from any site right in the browser.
I have Share Online 3.0 on a 20.2.011 firmware and I still don’t have the active standby feature. Any pointers on how to activate/fix it?
I’ve got a couple of problems. The backup went fine, the firmware update went fine, the restore stopped at 89%. Tried 4 times for 2-3 hours and still won’t go past 89%. The file is still there, any suggestions? Also when I slide to the music player it no longer automatically goes to that screen. Just turns the main screen to the side. HELP
Henry,
Nokia Software Updater (NSU), both the standalone and the one integrated with PC Suite, still doesn’t support Vista. AFAIK, the rest of PC Suite still works under Vista. I’m happily running XP so I can’t ofter any first hand advice.
According to Nokia, the problem was caused by something Microsoft changed in a recent security update and that Nokia is working on a solution but there’s no ETA.
NSU has never supported the Mac.
Users have reported successfully updating with NSU on Vista by setting compatibility level to XP SP2 (Right click the .exe. choose properties, then compatibility). But updating firmware is risky enough without using an unsupported hack like this. I won’t risk it on my phones.
My advice, find someone with XP or wait for Nokia to fix the problem. I can’t believe it will be that much longer considering all the flack they are getting over this.
Thank you Dennis. Nokia tells me that PC Suite does not support Vista at this time. I can’t seem to download the new firmware. Can it be done with a Mac? or must we simply without choice find someone with Windows XP? And thanks for your list of applications.
Thanks!
I will have a look and maybe found some useful stuff.
Carl,
I haven’t put them all back and I don’t actually have a list of what I used to have, unfortunately. It may not have been quite forty. Here are the ones I remember. They are all free, by the way:
Opera Mini 4.1
Opera Mini 3.1
gMail
GoogleMaps
MGMaps
MobiReader
Nokia Podcasting
Yahoo Go
Shozu
Fring
Gizmo
Solytare
Socialight
PhoNetInfo
Y Tasks
Y Browser
ScreenShot
Widsets
WebWag
Calcium
LightNotepad
Navizon
IFinfo
So that’s 22 apps, I know I had more but if I don’t remember them I guess they weren’t that important to me. I’m sorry I don’t have links, you can fing all of these by Googling “S60 3rd” + the name of the app.
One of these days I’ll do a “What’s on my N95” type post with details and URLs.
Dennis, you mention that you have “40 or so applications” in the phone. It would be very interesting to see what they are? :)