Ok so the title may be a BIT harsh…but as of yesterday’s firmware update to v20, it’s changed how I’ve used the device - and that is most definitely a plus.
Honestly of all of the updates in the new firmware, there are three I actually care about:
- Demand Paging
- New Music Player/Podcasting functionality
- Camera Improvements
Demand Paging
So what is this now? It’s some fancy memory management changes that deal with only loading portions of executables into usable system ram as necessary versus taking the time to load entire binaries blah blah blah. Yeah I could do some more research and get all technical into it (which to be fair I may enjoy reading up on) but it’d probably be boring to most. What it really means is the N95 is no longer throwing up out of memory errors every 10 minutes while I try to do silly things like oh, use the features of the phone. Mobile web browsing is oddly important to me. I’m not sure why, but it is. And for some reason I’m dumb enough to want to load the huge pc versions of websites. Hey this thing has a real browser, why not right? So I load pages up and they display great, until about half the data is downloaded and horrible memory errors start popping up, simultaneously filling the browser screen with empty boxes and helpfully closing the music player that was in the background keeping my going on whatever mp3 or podcast (more on this below) I was listening to at the time to free up more memory that the device already decided it didn’t have enough of. And so the super powerful flash supporting web browser was practically useless for any websites that might actually have flash because those same sites are going to be pushing this phone past its old memory limits and into memory-error-land before the damned intro animation I’m just trying to skip finishes loading. Do I sound bitter? Really I’m not. And so here comes Nokia with their new Demand Paging technology (or maybe more apropos here comes Symbian as it sounds more of a kernel-level function than something Nokia’s S60 interface would involve, but I digress). And hey look, things load faster (because it’s loading less parts of them). And hey look, all of my other applications don’t close down when I decide to do something on this multitasking device that previously could only really multitask if both of those tasks involved doing the same thing in the same application at the same time. The test site for me for a while was the PC version of the amazon.com webpages - image heavy, and the N95 now loads it up without hesitation, and more importantly, without shutting down the music player in the background. Side note, current running apps on the N95: Contacts, Messaging, Log, Search, Jaiku, Music Player, and Podcasting. At the same time.
Music Player / Podcasting Integration
Yes I’m a dork. I listen to podcasts. I subscribe to podcasts. Atleast I don’t make my own…so I’m only 90% of the way to dorkland…gimme some more time and I’m sure I’ll get there eventually. But so as mentioned above one of my huge annoyances would be listening to podcasts and then being stupid enough to try to do something else which the N95 deemed too memory intensive thereby shutting down the music player that was playing said podcast. Why was this annoying? Because it couldn’t keep track of where I was! Seriously, when listening to something that’s 30-60 minutes long, do you really want to have to stop to check where on the timeline you are every few minutes, just in case something happens to push memory over the limits and losing it, just so you can restart the music player and manually scan back to where you are? But finally, at long last, Nokia has fixed this problem in the podcasting app, and the world can rejoice. Sort of. If you go through Music Player, and from there pick podcasts, and from there play it, it picks up where you left off perfectly. I’ve heard if you just find the file and try to play it it won’t, but hey I’ll compromise here. And really that’s all there is to it. The sheer fact that it keeps track of where I am in podcasts makes this actually usable as a device on which to listen to podcasts. Funny that.
Camera Improvements
Not so much to say here. Really everything’s just faster. And it’s a good thing. In a quick test it was about 5 seconds to be able to take a picture, and about 1 second to take. That’s a HUGE improvement over what it was, and further helps this be my portable point-n-shoot camera. Again, not a huge writeup of what it means, other than that when my kid’s doing something cute, I no longer have to pull the camera out, hide it behind my back for 10 seconds, whip it out and hope he’s still being cute after another 3-5 seconds before the photo is actually taken. And for you non-parents, hiding behind the back is because as soon as he sees it, well kids tend to either fear the camera, or like mine, pose. And while posing is adorable, it’s not the photo I want taken generally.
So there you have it…the N95 gets a new firmware, and becomes that much more useful…which for a device as expensive as it is, Thank God.
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