Nokia N95 software update

I’ve been using a Nokia N95 for nearly year now and there’s no doubt it’s a pretty cool phone. One of the things I’ve been impressed with is the number of excellent free applications there are out on the web to download. Many of these come from Nokia themselves. The phone I use is on contract from one of the main UK providers, who’ve somewhat customised the phone’s software to suit themselves. Initially this wasn’t a problem for me, in fact I think they’d added some useful touches that the standard N95 lacked.

Within a couple of weeks of signing up for the phone, Nokia announced an update to the firmware. I dutifully downloaded the Nokia Updater software and ran it. The software detected that I was using an old version of the firmware and the update worked perfectly. As it happened there was little noticeable difference from the original, but I was happy. As time passed Nokia released more updates, sometimes adding features and others small bug fixes. However, each time I ran the software updater it said I was running the latest version of the firmware, which was frustrating as often the prompt for me to run it was an email from Nokia announcing the launch of the latest version! This annoyed me so I rang my network provider who informed me they hadn’t approved the latest version so it wouldn’t install on my phone! In September 2008, Nokia released version 30.0.015 with some significant improvements including their own screen rotation feature that makes use of the built in accelerometer. I wanted this update!

Luckily, as with most things nowadays there are answers to this on the internet, the first being to debrand your phone. Now this is not for the faint of heart! There are a number of people out there who have only succeeded in converting their wonderful N95 “it’s what computers have become” smartphone into N95 shaped paper weights! So be warned! The process I followed was here:

http://www.expansys.com/ft.aspx?k=90092

Have a read through the comments that follow the main text – I thought I’d knacked my phone a couple of times, especially when it came up with the message “Phone Start-Up Failed. Contact your Retailer.”  Aaargh!

Luckily a hard reset saved the day.  To do this:

Turn your phone off.

Hold in the green call button, the * button and the 3 button.

Still holding in these buttons, turn the phone on,

(Did I mention you need to grow a couple of extra fingers first?)

It worked for me and sure enough the next time I ran the Nokia software updater it worked beautifully.  The only problem I had was that my backup didn’t restore completely and I had to reinstall quite a few of my applications.