Keep your firmware… firm?
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009I recently upgraded from an N95 (an awesome phone) to its bigger brother, the N96. Though I’ve gone with Nokia for my last few phones as I’ve grown to love the way they work, I think I’ve owned a couple or so phones from pretty much every brand out there by now.
With each one I found the same thing – the phone at launch has certain issues. Always.
| My shiny new N96 had pretty lame battery life. The camera took a good 6 or 7 seconds from opening the camera app to me being able to take a picture. The menu was a bit slow to react, the search was sluggish, and my Bluetooth connection was occasionally cutting out while I was transferring my photos.
Happily, I’ve had enough phones to know by now that the early kinks of all these smartphones are generally ironed out in the months following its launch, with numerous firmware upgrades. Do most don’t bother with these? A quick trip to Google rewarded me with the update file, which I duly ran and – amazingly enough – it was almost like having a new phone. The battery seems to last a lot longer now, and the camera is much improved, and I haven’t had the Bluetooth issue since. There’s a lot more that has been fixed, too, but I’m glad that all my major problems with the phone were sorted out. I’ve had this experience now with phones from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola. A phone that was a bit of a pain to use before suddenly gets a new lease of life. Sometimes the new firmware will include major updates – take Apple’s new 3.0 OS, for example, which brings copy/paste, MMS and device-wide search capabilities. |
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So, Google your phone model and see if you can find a firmware update – it’s a must!
