Nokia’s N96 suckiness doesn’t end with the firmware

I’ve been a huge fan of Nokia hardware over the years. Not for me the snazzy iPhone or the city slicker Crackberry. But…the N96 has shattered my faith in the company. Along the way I’ve learned a few inconvenient truths about mobile handsets.

Since I travel a lot around Europe and the US, I need an unbranded, unsubsidized phone. That means paying top whack for a handset. In early October, I bought an N96 to replace the N95 I’d broken. Almost from day one I was carrying around the equivalent of a £549 brick.

The firmware of the time was due for an upgrade to version 11.018. This is something I can easily do now that Nokia allows ‘over the air’ upgrades. However, it quickly became apparent that the 11.018 firmware is dog slow. Over the next few weeks, it got worse and worse until the handset became almost unusable (check the video above.)

I’m not the only one complaining about this and other problems (read the comments NOT the main review) associated with the N96. When I went to Paris, I bent the ear of the Nokia folk who acknowledged there are issues but assured me the 12.043 release would solve my problems. Except for one minor detail. The upgrade hasn’t been released for UK phones.

There is a solution but it requires that you fool the handset into believing it is something that it isn’t. That probably breaks the warranty but by this stage I was seriously contemplating giving it the Telefonica sucks treatment.

Anyhoo – in order to fiddle the handset I needed to run a Windows program called Nemesis Service Suite. As a Mac user that means running Windows inside a virtual machine. Except that the hardware and software don’t exactly get on together when run in this mode. I found I had to fire up Windows, wait for all the drivers to load, fire up the N96, then plug the two together via USB, wait for Windows to acknowledge the connection and then run the Nemesis program. But it doesn’t end there.

When you attach a modern Nokia to a ‘PC’ it asks if you’re running in one of four modes. The one you need is PC Suite. When that is done, the N96 should show the USB symbol. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. If it doesn’t then Windows can’t ’see’ it. Even when it does show the symbol, if you’ve not gone through the sequence described earlier, Windows still doesn’t see it and so any software designed to interact with the phone cannot see it either. That means a Windows reboot.

Having fiddled the phone into believing it is a Euro 2 handset model, I then attempted the upgrade using the Nokia Software Upgrader. Bear in mind this is a 121MB download. The first problem was to ensure the two devices could see each other. Check. Then download and wait for the upgrade to happen.

Three attempts later and with 2 minutes to go on the progress meter, the upgrader told me that it had lost contact with the N96. That meant a rebooting of Windows plus the N96 and starting over. Except that I didn’t need to because the upgrade had happened. I can only assume that stray files were left over.

Then comes the data restore which is run through PC Suite. The same hardware checking routine is necessary. Once again it apparently failed yet I got all my contacts back (the most important concern.) And somehow, my most frequently used applications were intact. I suspect that’s because I have them located in a different memory store to the phone’s C:> drive.

Does the newly upgraded phone work any better. Yes it does. Will performance degrade? I don’t know. Am I a happy bunny? Far from it. And neither are a lot of others. Nokia’s firmware rollout program is a mystery. If anyone can explain the logic I’d be delighted.

The PC Suite software should be capable of running flawlessly in a VM but it doesn’t. Neither do they have a Mac version. OK – we’re in a minority but for a surefire way to drive Mac people into the arms of Apple’s iPhone?

The more worrying problem centres on the carriers. In the UK (and other parts of the world), the carriers provide buyers with a significant handset subsidy. Even so, those same carriers need users to be on plan for at least 12 months to recover their costs. However, once you’re hooked, they are slow to upgrade firmware. That’s one of the reasons people like to debrand their handsets, even if that means running the risk of messing up the warranty arrangements. Why the carriers take this asinine and myopic position is beyond me, other than to subtly force upgrades to the next handset and plan lock-in. It’s a vicious death spiral for your wallet.

OK – so I am picking on Nokia but as the world brand leader they should be setting a far better example than they do. If this is the shape of things to come in the mobile telco world then I’d be happier switching to something that is more reliable. Even if that means I get less by way of function.

Having been a customer for more years than I can remember, having had N1600, N6600, N95 and now N96 and having wasted hours researching problems Nokia should be solving and then more time trying to fix, I’m ready to defect.

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