I should finish that statement by saying it’s my last Nokia phone, EVER!
I bought my NokiaN97 back in June. I’m not ashamed to admit that I, like everyone else that ever ordered one of these devices, was excited like I’d never been about a phone. The prospect of what was promised by Vodafone and Nokia was overwhelming the senses. However, I very quickly found myself, like pretty much everyone else that has ever ordered this device, sad and disappointed to entirely new levels.
Where do I start .. well the device came shipped with the then current firmware level of 10.x .. right out of the box it was acting odd.. dropped calls, low phone signals levels where there should full signals, etc, etc. The worst at the time was making and taking calls… you might be lucky and get a call in and you might be lucky to not have the device crash and reboot during or immediately after a call. This was frustrating to say the least.
While the start of my relationship with my new N97 was rocky it was manageable . Plus the promise of the much talked about V11 firmware and how it would fix a lot of problems, that and that alone kept me hopeful that we could make things work (me and the N97). Firmware V11 came and went, sure, some problems were resolved, but entirely new problems were introduced. Once again, we were on the rocks with our relationship. I managed, somehow, to tolerate the device. It wasn’t crashing randomly any more, which I suppose is a positive thing. However, one of the new problems that came with V11 was a memory leak that slowly filled up my C:. The first time it happened I received an “out of memory” error and the phone crashed and rebooted. Upon reboot I was confused at first since the C: had about 18meg free. I then noticed it would slowly fill as days went on and crash again.
Until now, I’ve not even touched on the other long laundry list of known issues with this device, including the much loathed Nokia N97 Self Harming issue where it scratches and destroys it’s own camera lense. Mine has been no exception to this issue, the lense is nicely scratched and gashed, thankfully not directly over the camera’s optics so the camera is still very usable. Others, however, have not been so lucky.
So, back to the story.. we last off with the tails of whoa over V11 firmware. Well, it was many months before Nokia finally released the even more anticipated V12 firmware. It was even longer for UK contract phone owners since the UK carriers either refused to push it out to us or they blamed Nokia for the delay. I don’t know where the problem really was or who was really to blame, suffice to say it sucked big time. Finally, V12 was released and the world cheered, until they installed it and noticed yet more problems were introduced, for some it was more problems then fixes. Some of my issues were fixed but my memory leak got worse. I could now only run my phone for 2 days before the C: would fill and the phone would crash or I had to reboot it.
Well, here I am now in Nov. After waiting for V20 to come out and then deciding not to wait until sometime next year I changed the product code on my phone by following the instructions on THIS PAGE. That worked a treat I was then able to upgrade to V20. That did not go well at all I have to say. The process of loading the firmware was fine, however after the initial reboot there were loads of performance issues and lots of crashes. After much Googling I’d come to conclusion that I needed to do a hard reset and rebuild my phone from scratch 
That was the first time I had to a full rebuild. Somewhat painful .. loads of apps to find and install, activation codes to find etc. More annoyingly was I had to rebuild all my menus again for all the apps. Very time consuming. Fine, I accepted that, the phone is crap, the OS is crap and Nokia is crap, just one of the little joys of having bleeding edge hardware and Beta software.
Well, last night the phone acted up and needed a reboot. This wasn’t the memory leak, that seemed to be mostly cured going to V20, I forgot to mention that above. I pushed the power button, turned off the phone. It did as it was suppose to. Power it back on.. it sits at the white Nokia screen for about 2-3 mins. This is NOT normal. 60-90 seconds boot time is normal for my phone. I pull the battery, try again. Leave it for 10 mins or so this time. Still, no boot. Bugger me. I pull the battery, sim card and microSD card out. Wait a few mins, replace the sim and battery and power on. Nothing, just the White Screen of Death. I tried all the “fixes” that others posted about, nothing at all. I was again forced to hard reset and rebuild my phone.
This was the last time I ever hard reset my phone for no valid reason. The next time the phone does this, I will hard reset it clear and format the internal mass storage and sell it on EBay for whatever I’m lucky enough to get for it. That will be it. I will also not be organizing my icons again or doing much else in the way of customizing my phone because of the hassles and time it takes, all to have it destroyed because Nokia can’t get it’s act together.
I would love to return the phone to Nokia for a full refund not to mention refunds for the software I’ve purchased for the device that will, on the next total lock up will become of no use to me since I won’t be using the device.
I am one very unhappy customer of Nokia at this point, the only good thing is knowing I’m no the only one. There are 1000′s and 1000′s of people that have bought this phone and posted about their deep disappointment with the device and Nokia in general. I hope, like me, they will all vote with their feet and refuse to by any more Nokia and Symbian based phones! I think my next phone will be an Android of some sort. It can’t be any worse. No, don’t even think of trying to talk into an Apple i-CAN’T DO WHAT I LIKE ON MY PHONE-Phone.
If you are thinking of buying a Nokia N97 I would strongly encourage you to spend 2 hours at least Googling about the device and issues people are having. Don’t take my rantings on here for it, see what everyone else is saying about the device. If you have any sense you’ll see it’s not a good investment, and a very costly one at that.
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