In a few hours, it will be 1st July 09, the release of the new N97 firmware: V11.0.021.

Teo, from Symbian-Freak, has found the changelog via serie-n.it, which at first glance for me looks great, as I’ve unfortunately encountered the bugs that required such fixes:

USB detection error fix

• PC does not detect N97 or USB charging connection not detected.

-Additionally for me, the N97 has twice frozen after being connected via USB, then after removal from USB, still displays the charging animation. It can only be restarted by removal of battery.

-Widget

• -Home screen online/offline widget crash fix
• -Fix for “Alphabetical and Number input are mixed in facebook until end key is pressed.

Fantastic. This has absolutely p’d me off when trying to post on friends’ walls/statuses and the keyboard is stuck to either numbers or symbols.

• -Widget UI improvement – New facebook widget fixes a problem of Home Screen background visible on soft-key area.

I’m loving the facebook widget for the N97. It does have certain stability issues, and annoyingly locks up if you suddenly lose signal in the middle of posting. As you cannot exit facebook to restart it, you have to restart the phone again.

The visible background thing also happens sometimes in the bloomberg widget.

• -Browser fixes to improve widgets stability.

I encountered an awful bug today which led the phone to crash every time I tried the browser or a widget. Restart after restart. I had to remove the battery to resolve the situation. Hopefully this is fixed.

-MfE related fixes

• -Partial fix for Messaging/calendar entry lost.
• -Mail for exchange calendar entry synchronization error fix.

-UI transition error fixes (Portrait <-> landscape transition, there is a home screen corruption.)

• -UI transition (Slowness and bad effects)

Ah, brilliant. The N97 UI looks much nicer if you set theme effects on. You’ve got a visual transition from homescreen to blank background, menus pop up nicer, and there is a transition (though pants) from landscape to portrait. However, it’s do painfully slow that I had to turn it off. I can’t wait 3 seconds for the phone to orientate itself.

• -Slow Touch UI response

Another annoyance which has caused a lot of finger mashing of the screen as you aren’t really sure if your presses are being registered.

• -Picture of the device lock appears half of the screen when transitioning the UI sometimes
• -Landscape: in some cases the soft buttons on touch (right hand) show the Home Screen in background (install maps.google.com)

-Photos thumbnail performance and stability improvements

• -Device performance deteriorates when lots of content in the device – especially photos

I don’t have much content yet, only a paltry proportion of the entire 29.8GB available, but I have noticed the phone to be steadily slowing down with each collection of new photos taken, music/video added.

Furthermore, photos taken in sequence mode take an age to appear in gallery beyond initial thumbnails. (But sequence mode is actually very good, with sufficient frames per second to be a real “burst” mode. Though I do miss “timed” sequences, e.g. 1 a minute. Good for stills time lapses)

• -Partial fix no display backlight illumination when unlocking lock-key – CAP Genius reported already.

I’ve had to restart sometimes because I thought the phone had frozen only to realise it’s just the backlight, but then it’s too late and I have to wait to restart.

• -New version of Accueweather to improve the “Connection error” situation

• -Device reset when browsing with high speed packet access (for Malaysia)
• -“Browser soft key UI doesn’t work after putting Chinese character with qwerty keyboard”
• -Java fixes (TCK, Pre-install app disappearing, *#7370#*)
• -Operator fixes (CMCC, Hutchson and Telefonica, Vodafone)
• -Ovi store client now embedded in the core image

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Some other annoyances that spring to mind right now (there’s more, but can’t remember) which aren’t on the changelog:

1. Voice command disabled. Maybe it’s just my handset. It worked a few times, and it was surprisingly accurate, even in a busy Cardiff shopping street. However, it proceeded to later crash, lock the device needed for a battery removal restart.
2. Music player in homescreen doesn’t always display the track that’s actually being played.
3. When slide closes from landscape view, (e.g. I’ve just typed in something, I want to minimise the form factor) the phone reverts into portrait even though I’m not holding the phone in portrait – then proceeds to switching back into landscape.

There are also some UI issues, which may have to wait for another firmware update, such as :

• continuity of kinetic scrolling.

This should not be just in certain apps, web browser/certain widgets. It should be a fluid character of every single area of the phone, stepping towards more finger friendly gestures.

• slowness in typing.

Using the keyboard, the letters seem to be slightly delayed before appearing on screen. It doesn’t happen when using the alphanumeric keyboard, but because the screen cannot register multiple presses, when typing at “fast” speeds with two thumbs, your input is not registered.

• Better input of numbers/punctuation from keyboard.

A lot of people have wished that the keyboard would register a long press as a number selection. e.g. instead of

“RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR” we get “4″.

Additionally, punctuation. Full stops, commas, apostrophes, question marks and exclamation marks are (I’m guessing) are the most frequently used. Strangely, it was much easier to get punctuation from the old style nokia keypads than this full fleged keyboard. Yeah, you get used to it. But full stops, commas and apostrophes should have never been mashed together in one button.

• Improved predictive text (mainly in QWERTY).

Both alphanumeric keyboard and physical qwerty have predictive text. It helps slightly as you get used to knowing what words will come up, so pressing spacebar on qwerty completes it (Set auto-fill on). However:

-it doesn’t have the intuition to know that when I’m pressing the awful .,’ button, in attempting to type “I’m, or I’ve or It’s, you get I.m/I.ve/It.s” Even when I’ve added it to the dictionary by spelling it, it still isn’t recognized.

-When you complete a previously entered word, it automatically fills it in, including any capital letters you may or may not want the second time around. You cannot undo it unless you type the last letter separately.

-Pressing up or down gives you suggestions on what you may have wanted to input, but it’s inconsistent. Sometimes it gives full words, sometimes it only gives a few letters. I may have to read the manual to ascertain the actual function of this, maybe it’s not meant to be for suggestions/corrections as it doesn’t fullfil either function properly.

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Whilst it’s a deep inconvenience to encounter these bugs on production firmware, it’s good to see Nokia fixing these bugs extremely quickly. As I remember from testing the N95, the guys fixing the firmware bugs were incredible. An email about a bunch of bugs to them and they release an update to fix it. Aha, if only it were that quick and simple for production units.

From Serie-N.it via Symbian-Freak