Nokia N96 woes

The latest issue of “Mobile” (a mobile computing rag) contains a short article looking at various issues and problems which are reported to their editors frequently. Particularly, the complaints are about the mis-advertised BBC iPlayer (their words) and a very weird bug which is said to disable handsets permanently is a wrong mailbox number is entered.

I have won a Nokia N96 at a recent giveaway and use it on Three’s network due to their generous sponsorship (they underwrite my data costs by 50%). So far, I have not encountered any major problems, but can’t say that I am too happy either. My pet peeves are (in random order):

CPU-heavy applications die randomly
When it comes to running CPU-heavy applications like my beloved Resco News, the N96 sometimes terminates the application after I push it in the background to do sth else while it loads. This has not happened on my N71 – don’t ask me what it is, but I don’t like it.

Crashes which require battery removal
Fixed in latest firmware.

F**ed-up video and photo quality
The photos produced by the N96 are terribly noisy even at moderate ISO settings. Videos are always out-of-focus…it looks like autofocus is disabled as soon as the video camera is turned on. Smart…

Unreliable 3G networking when tethered
When connecting the device to my MSI Wind U100, the 3G connection dies randomly and rather often. Don’t ask me why this happens, but its highly annoying.

Furthermore, friends and even people sitting next to me in trains or trams have asked me about how I fare with the device – more than one of them has had a horror story to share (one particularly poor lady bought the device on Austria’s government carrier and sold it with a 50% loss soon afterwards as it simply “didn’t work”).

In the end, I think that Nokia has shot itself in the foot with the N96. Don’t get me wrong, I love the phone – but the firmware still is unreliable a few months after release. This has led to the device getting a bad reputation…I am not sure how Nokia wants to get out of this self-dug snakepit…

Related posts:

1. Video woes – or – Where da keynote videos at?
2. Nokia N96 gets firmware update
3. Nokia 5800 XpressMusic – quality woes
4. Nokia E90 woes – misinformed users
5. MeeGo powered beast N9 appears in a teaser