In my ongoing saga on my excellent, unbranded Nokia N95 smartphone : Now the PC Suite’s Nokia Software Updater (NSU) announced that firmware version 31.0.014 is available. I have been thinking to switch to N96 but after the announcement of N97 I guess that it is really not worth of it. Therefore I thought that since I need to keep the Good Old Faithful alive still for awhile, I would give the latest upgrade a go.

Of course, I took a full backup with Content Copier before making the upgrade. Because I am still using the Best Safe application (there is still now built-in Wallet application), I took again the time to export all its card data into a CVS file on the memory card before upgrade. Otherwise there is no way to restore your secret cards after the re-installation.

After the reboot of the system, *#0000# gives now

v31.0.014
06-11-08
RM-159
©Nokia N95(01.01)

Sincerely, I could not tell the difference. Time that I am writing this, most of the threads out there talk about a security update. After using the phone for a while, here’s the list of changes and/or problems that I spotted:

  • The “Live” Menu buttons are, errh, much more live
  • Nokia Maps is version v2.0 wk30 b04 and is capable to make approximate location without satellites, using the GSM stations for calculation. This feature was already present in 30.0.015, though. Something has broken, since I cannot share My Favorite Locations with Google Maps anymore:I use Google Maps’ Search feature which is much more powerful than the crap Search of Nokia Maps. With Nokia you need to know how the street address exactly and still it sometimes finds the street in the neighboring city! With Google you can use a wild search term, like “dentist” and you will spot what you need straigth away. But the maps in Nokia Maps are better and so are its routing and other navigation capabilities. Therefore I save the location in Google Maps in Favourites. In Nokia Maps, you can use Favourites -> My Places to find the same place very quickly.Helas, the My Places selection does not open anymore in Nokia Maps. You can only Search it (sigh!) or open it in Phone’s Menu->Tools->Landmarks, which allows you to open the place in Nokia Maps. This, of course is a brain damage alternative.You need to download the latest Nokia Maps from
    http://europe.nokia.com/A4984204
    I got v2.0 wk45 b03, which got the Nokia Maps Favourites’ My Places to work again. Quite strange this version did not get its way into the 31.0.014, since the problem appeared already in 30.0.015.
  • The Photo Gallery Zoom function is now super fast.
    Wow! But how come it took three years to find the good algorithm since obviously the hardware has always been capable enough. Earlier, as we can remember N95’s zoom function was all but useless and if you ever made the mistake to use it when you showed your photos to your friends, you lost all the glory that your fancy gadget phone might have gave you.
  • Accelerator sensor based automatic screen orientation is now somewhat faster and more predictable. Now you can even leave it on..

Conclusion is that it is probably not worth of the hassle to upgrade from 30.0.015, but if you are coming from 20.0.015 or earlier, you should definetely make the upgrade.