New life into an old phone 1

Preparation and building

N95 8GB - the recession buster

So, (and it took little longer than I anticipated) to bring you up to speed if you’ve not read the previous post: I had a Nokia N95 and rather than buy a newer Nokia or switch to Android or Apple, I thought I’d see if software updates would make it last a little bit longer.

After all, one of the reasons for getting an expensive smartphone to start with was for occasional new software and features, except that I never got around to doing many of them.

Here’s my prep list

1) Back up all  contacts, messages, audio, video pictures. Don’t just rely on the phone’s internal backup, I kept a copy on my computer too. You can never be too careful, my phone is my life.

2) Download Nokia’s software update tool and follow the instructions. The update will be about half an hour.

3)  It’s possible that you have firmware locked to a particular network operator, in which case the Nokia software update tool won’t give you the most recent version for your phone.

You can unlock this yourself by downloading some free software and carefully following ‘debranding’ guides such as these:

Nigel Coldwell’s firmware unbranding guide

Rich Edwards’s debranding guide

(Doing this will invalidate your warranty, although it’s probably run out now anyway.)

And now I have firmware version V35.0.001 from November 2009. Yes, it’s over a year old, but this is a definite improvement on the July 2008 stuff I was running.

So what’s it got me?

Nokia Maps 2

N-Gage games

Ovi store

And  a bunch of other apps! Which apps I chose and why coming up in part 2.