Because we won’t be getting the sainted iPhone in the UK until the end of the year, I have a Nokia N95 as my current handset. It’s good but not great and today I discovered why. The mobile operators int he UK seem to have hobbled the phone firmware down at a crappy version (10.0.xxx) in my case which gives an old set of software for the camera, GPS, battery life etc. Well Nokia is currently running at around version 12 which is better in every respect. So I found this site which tells you how to flash the firmware by changing the phone’s product code. Half an hour and a 115mb download later and I have, effectively, a brand new phone that has better battery life, camera, GPS support, 3.5g data and more that I haven’t looked into yet.
The only reason that I can think of for Orange to not allow me to upgrade my firmware without the fairly deep hacks required at the moment are to prevent me using VoiP and thus earn them more money, so you can be sure that the first thing I do over the weekend will be to download the latest version of Skype for Symbian 🙂
How are you finding the N95?
The better battery life comment intrigues me. My current phone is dying, but I’m holding out for the E90.
The N95 would also be fine for me, apart from reports of poor battery life – if the improvement is a significant one, then I may get an N95 yet!
It’s a very good handset and if you just use it as a phone then the battery life is fine. Of course it does so much more than just phonecalls that if you don’t use the features you may as well just have a Razr or something. So if you use the media player, GPS or any of the other advanced features you are literally looking at the battery being drained within 3 hours!
You have to be very careful about what is left running as well. I played for a while with Jaiku { http://www.jaiku.com“ rel=”nofollow” target =”blank”>Link } and if you leave the client running it will kill the phone within 4 hours!
You just have to learn to use the phone in a different way that any other handset I’ve ever owned.
Matt
A better battery life then, but still not quite what I want.
I plan on using a lot of data services – I already do on my old Nokia 7610 – so I suspect I’ll hammer the battery too much on an N95.
So I guess I’ll just have to wait for the E90… *sighs*
Thanks for your impressions Matt!