I updated my Nokia 700 today. It’s an unlocked, unbranded phone running Symbian Belle, that was advertised as having OS updates in February and April this year—but those updates never arrived. I eventually lost patience, and made the updates using underhand and possibly illegal tools. 
In an earlier post I said that I wasn’t too bothered about OS updates. For the most part that’s true. I don’t mind that my Android tablet (the original Galaxy Tab) hasn’t had an update since Android 2.3. I appreciate that Samsung gave some sign of having actually looked into whether an update would run well on it and decided that it wouldn’t. That puts me in a better position than friends with the iPhone 3 who had their devices rendered into sludge by an iOS update too far.
But Nokia—they really worked hard at winding me up. The February update didn’t just piddle about with the core OS, it also added some applications that I was genuinely interested in trying and that couldn’t be installed any other way. The April update didn’t mess about either, it actually increased the phone’s CPU clock speed. (How? Why was it lower to begin with?)
And for UK unlocked devices, they had two product codes: evidently the good and the bad. The good got the updates, and I had the bad. The bad didn’t get the updates.
So having waited until late July, I lost patience and re-flashed the thing.
I’m a bit cross about it because of, well, being put to such lengths and made to feel like I actually cared, about something so trivial.
On the other hand… a Nokia 700 with the latest Belle FP1 is a really nice phone. It’s hard to stay cross for long.
Neat, thin form factor, excellent screen, expandable storage and replaceable battery, physical buttons all well placed. Yes, it’s immaculately built… in Hungary, where Nokia laid off most of their workers at the end of last year.
With Belle FP1 and the faster clock speed, it’s smooth, straightforward and enjoyable to use. Sure there are some extra things I could still do with (integrated notifications of new email for example) but it’s for the first time a phone I could actually recommend to friends who liked the size and construction… running on an operating system cut adrift in February last year and effectively canned with Nokia’s last round of layoffs.
There aren’t as many good apps as on other platforms, but it does have a number of smooth Qt-based ones, including a few very slick and useful apps from Nokia, and it’s an attractive device for a Qt developer like me to think of developing for… if only there was an ecosystem around it and if only future devices were compatible… and if Nokia hadn’t abandoned Qt in their platform strategy twice, once with the switch to WP7 and again when refocusing on S40 a month ago.
Yep, the 700 is a wonderful example of what might have been.
I’m tempted to buy another as a spare, just because I like it so much and its future is so plainly bleak. I wonder how many of the services on it would stop working if Nokia went under?
The Breakfast Post 