I’ve had the N70 since April and I’m still in two minds about it. My biggest beef is less with Nokia and more with Vodafone.
When I got the phone, I checked the firmware and it was at v2.x whilst a check on the web said that the latest was v5.x. I went into Choice Communications in Cork city and asked for an upgrade. It came back with exactly the same version. I badgered the Choice guy but his argument was that the “system” decides the correct upgrade and that’s what it picked. This is despite the fact that the worksheet had v5.x listed as the newest one. In fact what I figured out later was that v2.x appears to be the latest Vodafone specific firmware.
This is ridiculous. The current firmware is riddled with bugs and the whole phone is very sluggish. Try pausing an MP3, switching over to the phonebook and receive an SMS - instead of beeping, the bloody thing restarts the MP3 on speakerphone. Great fun in an office!
Does anyone in Ireland have an N70 with v5.x firmware and if so, how did you get it? Is there anyone who will flash one with generic firmware for a few bob? Is there any indication that Voda will ever release a branded v5.x firmware?
Apart from that, I like the size and shape of the phone, the speakerphone is excellent, bluetooth headsets work well (but don’t auto-connect for some reason) and I kinda like the Lifeblog idea as a visual history of my phone usage. I don’t publish that stuff to a real blog (it only supports Typepad anyway) but it is nice to have on the PC. Third party apps that I like include Shozu for auto-upload to Flickr (rarely used due to the idiotic Voda data charges), Airset (calendar sync), Opera (web browser), OggPlay (music player), Frozen bubble (game), M-SuDoKu (go on, guess), Python (what geek could resist?), FExplorer (file utility). Third party apps I don’t like include PicoBlogger (doesn’t bloody work at all).
Other gripes with the phone itself are the music player (utter rubbish), number of key presses to send an SMS and the low quality of the camera (for which I had high hopes).
Speaking of music players, can someone please create one targetted at podcast listening? What I need is something that allows me to fast forward quickly and allows me to bookmark within a track. I am sick to death of stopping a podcast 40 minutes in, returning to it later and then spending 5 minutes with my finger on fast forward trying to get back to that point. Maybe even the ability to manually enter a position in a track would be an improvement. I thought Oggplay would solve a lot of my issues but it gets completely confused with my tracklists at the moment so I rarely use it.
Luckily, so far I haven’t had the hot-leg effect that Bernie gets with his.
And finally, to repeat an oft-stated annoyance - would O2 and Voda please get a clue and provide flat-rate data plans like they do in many other countries? Can their number crunchers not do simple sums? 10000 users X crazy price per KB is a much smaller revenue number than 500000 users X €10 fixed extra charge per month.
[tags]Nokia, N70, Oggplay, Vodafone, flat-rate[/tags]
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