Thursday, October 12, 2006

Updating Nokia N80's firmware

Yesterday, I went to a Nokia support centre here in Gijon. I asked for a firmware upgrade. The person in charge told me that if I had noticed any important bug they would upgrade it for free. But if I was just looking for new functionalities, then I'd have to pay 18€. Nice try. It sounded annoying to me: I have not seen any firmware in any device in which the number of bug corrections is much much higher than the number of new functionalities (if there are any).

The real thing is that my N80 was behaving OK but the list of bug corrections is large and many of them happen in scenarios that I have not experienced yet (but that I will, in a near future). Besides, my v3 firmware does not support FOTA and v4 does.

I would only have to print the list of bug corrections and justify a free update. But today is holiday in Spain so I started to search for information about people talking about the 18€ thing in this country.

What I finally found was even better: a page in Nokia's UK site for the download of a tool called Nokia Software Updater. It was only available in English version, but my phone was multilingual and came with English by default (which I quickly shifted to Spanish).

I downloaded it, plugged my N80 to the laptop and upgraded the firmware. Of course, I lost PIM information but it was obvious that this would happen and it is nothing that a new synchronisation would not fix. Also, some software installed in the mempry of the phone disappeared (obvious too) and most of the software installed in the miniSD was there. In fact, all of the Symbian applications were there and working. Only Java apps stopped working: they were shown in "My Own" folder but nothing happenned by clicking their icons. Re-installation fixed it all.

The main problem is the loss of Spanish language: English, Français, Deutsch, Túrkçe, Italiano and Nederlands. Still wondering why Spanish is not in the list, but I think I will be able to deal with it :-)

Installing and re-installing applications has made me think about some decisions that phone manufacturers take on our behalf and that I would like to get changed. In my next post :-)

2 comments:

kOoLiNuS said...

Hi Ignacio,
for what i know the Software Update procedure recorgnizes the IMEI unique code of your handheld and checks where it does belong.

Maybe your device was from a commercial region which avoids spanish language and before the update you got that thanks to the Importer "cure".

This happens quite often here in italy where we have TelCo branded phones, Manifactures's imported phone and then paralell import.

I whish you good luck in getting back spanish language on your N80!


PS = you could make your blog commentable also from non-Blogger people, think about it, plz !

Unknown said...

Thanks a lot, koolinus! You have the privilege ( :-) ) of being the 1st commenter to this blog.

I did not know about that importer "cure" stuff although I guess that nothing can surprise us nowadays.

Removing limits to comment as wished...