It seems like I am becoming a bit of a grumpy old man on twitter and now this blog but here you go :
Update : back on the blackberry 8310 : the N97 has gone back, I was getting there slowly with the phone ( mostly because it was cheap ) but the coverage was the killer in the end
I got a Nokia N97 to try at lunch time today. By 14:00 I was ready to throw it out the window, it has been an awful experience. For those who don’t know the N97 is Nokia’s flagship iphone beater.
The N97 has some attractive features such as the keyboard, radio, Notes Traveler but when it was launched a few months ago it was horrendously buggy. A recent upgrade in the firmware to 2.x was meant to have made it much more stable.
Maybe I am expecting too much as it is a while since I had a true smart phone ( I have been a Blackberry Curve user for a few years ) but there are just so many things that don’t work and I expected more from a prestige phone. In hindsight the blackberry is just soooo easy.
Firmware 2.x
> There is no way to show the new email count from traveller on the front screen There is but it shows 200 unread even after I have marked them as read
> it is one click to the traveller inbox but then it is 5 clicks to get back out as you exit via the nokia messaging system / SMS messages etc..
> You cannot easily get it to recognise that wifi is faster than 2G/3G for browsing
> It has crashed twice
> It has run out of memory once
> The keylock switch has refused to unlock the keyboard requiring a battery reboot
> it keeps dropping the WLAN connection
> sometimes its a double click for a menu and others its a single click for a similar menu
> The browser experience is not great – it tries to be better than the blackberry in being much richer but in practice I much prefer the simple blackberry browser
> message that traveler is not compatible with this operating system ( S60 5th edition )
> the auto rotate feature does not work It does but it is disabled by default
Firmware 1.x
> The automatic update over the air would not recognise that version 2.x of the firmware was available ( the phone is 0 days old )
> the tone dialling doesn’t work on telephone tone menus
And some other ones :
> The FM radio won’t even try and work without a headset lead plugged in ( its the aerial )
> You can’t just hit the green phone button and dial unless it is an existing contact
> I have no t-mobile 3g signal in an area supposedly with an area of very good coverage
> I can’t find an easy way to automatically bar data when roaming – the blackberry can do this and in Northern Ireland it is too easy to roam by accident along the border
> Nokia just transferred me to a specialist team assuring me that they were open : they were closed : hopefully they will ring me tomorrow – they did at 09:30 – thanks
More
> the OVI store won’t work on wfi only slow gprs
> there is no decent free twitter client that seems to work with the touch screen ( although gravity is very nice at