Nokia N93 Software Updates Available Again

I
didn’t get much sleep last night because I stumbled over this post over at Symbian-Freak just before midnight which proclaimed that software updates are available again for the Nokia N93 on the Nokia software update site. As the software on my N93 was quite dated (V 10.0.025, 12.07.2006) and had a few irritating bugs, I was more than happy to update right away instead of sleeping it over first. As can be seen on the picture on the left, the software version to which my N93 is now upgraded is V 20.0.058.

The software update itself took about 30 minutes as the software first updated itself (20MB) and then downloaded the almost 80 MB image file for the phone. Quite amazing how much firmware fits into a small phone these days. I made a backup of my data before the the update and restored it after the update was complete. While calendar entries and most settings were properly restored I had to reinstall all 3rd party applications. This took quite some time as I use about a dozen of them. On the good side, most applications detected their previous settings which were stored on the memory card so I didn’t have to reconfigure Profimail, RescoNews, the Nokia Podcast catcher and Handysafe. Together with ensuring that all applications still run as desired the whole process took about one and a half hours. As I said, not much sleep last night 😉 But it was worth it because I immediately noticed a number of great improvements and new features:

• The camera application has been improved. Once you swivel the phone back into closed or phone position, the camera app closes instead of staying open and using the internal camera;

• There seems to be slightly more available program memory as the S60 browser and Profimail were able to co-exist simultaneously despite some serious web surfing;

• Browser stability seems to have improved. It didn’t crash since I made the update;

• The long awaited Wifi Overview on the idle screen is finally here (see picture);

• RescoNews and Handy Weather make use of big lists. With the old software version it took quite a long time (10-15 seconds) for these lists to be generated. With the new software version, these programs are a lot faster now;

• The new software version allows the user to lock to phone to the UMTS to prevent fall-backs to GSM. This is quite handy as there are still operators around who can’t set their network parameters correctly and make my Nokia mobiles switch to GSM while UMTS coverage is still good. While that doesn’t matter much for making phone calls it’s quite irritating when using the phone as a ‘modem’ for the notebook.

One thing I haven’t figured out quite yet is how to get rid of the message I get now every time I start the phone that untrusted applications have been found on the memory card and that I should go to the application manager to fix this. The application manager shows three applications with cryptic names and says they not installed but I can’t delete them or do anything else with them (see second picture)!? Time will tell. So all in all, I am quite happy about the improvements I got but still wished the update process would be a bit more seamless. No problem for me but I wouldn’t let my girlfriend perform this procedure on her own.