Review: Nokia N95-3 Firmware 20.2.011

After long delays finally Nokia released a firmware update for the Nokia N95 NAM (N95-3). I updated my phone as soon as the Nokia Software Updater told me about it. So far the experience has been mixed in my case.

Nokia N95-3

Demand Paging

This update at last implements on-demand paging on this device. The effect is quite noticeable: with the old firmware I had 70MB RAM free, while I now have 83MB. Note that this includes the antivirus. Besides the obvious free RAM, I also feel the phone more responsive and with a better startup time. Another performance improvement I have noticed is in the camera startup and processing time. Now it is really usable.

Flash

Also in this update if Flash Lite 3, the long awaited Flash update for this model. Functionality is now up to the experience described for the N95 8GB. I could watch some videos from within the web browser.

Browser

However there are some bad points in this update. The web browser is somewhat unstable, crashing sometime when I enter to Settings. Also I have a bug with WLANs which makes the phone not recognize a WLAN I have defined and asks the access details again. This creates another access point in the Access Point configuration in the form of “MyWLAN (1)”. This wasn’t there in any previous version (11.x, 10.x).

Menu

I liked the way the menus were in previous versions. They didn’t change from 10.x to 11.x. However in this version they have gone, in my opinion, a somewhat big redesign. While they are better organized, it adds extra clicks to get where you want. Anyway, you could tweak your menu to make it appear similar to previous versions.

Developers

If you’re a developer you’ll have problems with on-device debug. I recommend installing AppTRK version 2.8.9 (which comes with Carbide.C++ 1.3.1), as previous versions will not work.

Conclusion

All said, I think this update is worth installing as it enhances performance and includes some nice new features. It would be nice if Nokia released this kind of upgrades more frequently, specially for high-end models such as this one. Well done Nokia!

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