No more firmware updates for the Sony Ericsson P990, W950 and M600
By Stefan Constantinescu on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 4:52 AM PST In Sony Ericsson, Symbian
Do you have a P990? First I feel sorry for you, not because of this announcement, but because that was probably the buggiest device I’ve ever used in my life. Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE) is no longer helping you out, time to get a better phone don’t you think? Nokia (NYSE: NOK) E61i comes to mind!
[Via: All About Symbian]
Full official statement from Niklas Sivander, Head of Product Management, after the jump
“These firmware releases meet the requirements of bug fixes prioritized by our operator customers and the Customer Services organization within different markets. The decision to freeze the P990, W950 and M600 firmware versions at this point has been made based on meeting these requirements. As with any phone project, no product is ever completely flawless. Any remaining issues are of course unfortunate, but we feel that with the level of quality on the latest P990 firmware we now have a good, solid product.
Due to all heavy features in P990, the need for RAM memory has grown. When running multiple memory-consuming programs at the same time, the available RAM memory runs low and sometimes results in the memory manager closing down one of the applications. We have been working on improving memory management during the whole lifecycle of the P990. The low RAM memory situation for the P990 will unfortunately remain for the heaviest users, and would not be fixed by a new firmware update since it’s hardware related. Multi-tasking on the P990 however works satisfactory provided that you don’t run too large and memory-consuming programs at the same time. Performance improvements have indeed been made for the new P1 phone compared to P990 and the user RAM available for applications has been increased with >400%, significantly improving multi-tasking performance and application behavior so that you can run a lot heavier programs simultaneously.
Many users are comparing the P990 with the stable and relatively problem-free predecessor P910, which was an excellent smartphone. The P910 was based on an earlier Symbian OS and UIQ platform version with only an incremental software development update from the P900 (Symbian OS 7.0, UIQ 2.1), which made the development work a lot smoother at the time. With the P990, the Symbian OS capabilities have however expanded quite significantly and as with any major platform update, this was expected to introduce some new issues to solve. Sony Ericsson however underestimated the complexity of the development work for UIQ 3 and it took longer than expected to implement and quality assure things like the platform security mechanisms, the multimedia framework and other advanced connectivity aspects like 3G, videotelephony and WiFi. It has been a tough journey for all of us. Please extend my thanks and appreciation to the user and developer communities for all their patience, support and feedback which has helped us identify bugs and improve both existing and upcoming products.”
Strengths:
- WIFI,
- Video call,
- 2 Megapixels camera with LED,
- great design,
- 4GB external memory support
- excelent piece of hardware (I take my hat off).
Weekness:
After upgrading to the latest (and apparently the last) FirmWare:
- Customer Support really bad, will leave final users on our own if something fails.
- Memory leakage (depends on the use, but if you are a PDA-heavy-core-user, maybe you would
require to reset it once a day), or else applications would not start, or suddenly slow/stoppage
of the device will be experienced.
- If Speaker mode is used, a buzz is heard, so you would have to reset your call, or press
twice on the Speaker key
- On long emails the application may not work and even more it would crash
- Text files over 400k might not open, and any other open application at that time will close.
- If not a heavy user… then you might experience 1 restart per week “to improve performance”
- Multiple processing not reliable due to a poor memory handling
- Was designed with too little memory to say last (poor memory dimension).
- Randomly (not all times) the alarm buzzes whenever it pleases (or not)… so be prepared to
be late if someday morning the alarm does not buzzes.
- Cannot hold installed application icon’s into selected folders, whenever the Memory Stick is
removed and inserted back.
- ..to mention some, plus more to discover.
Experience:
I have had this mobile for 5 months, it was not a cheap phone at all, but previous experiences
(P800, and P910) really well deserved it. At start up I realized this phone was not a stable…at
all! (WIFI could not handle a long time connection, many restarts per week, camera autofocus was
a crap!, etc), I had upgraded twice, and finally had the FirmWare (R6) that would solve most of
the problems.
Some bugs went away, and some new bugs appeared. Now SE decided to stop supporting this mobile
eventhough there are pretty obvious bugs.
Conclusion:
If you have a better option… then take it. Or else prepare yourself to keep your bugs for your own.
It is a shame that a high quality phone, has such poor support as SE is giving. It is supposed that
a high quality phone would have as minimum, a high quality software inside… but this was not the
case… and P990 FirmWare R6 is the base for the latest P1.
BEWARE!!!!
SE mis-sold the top-priced P990 for a business user to “leave their laptop in the office”, but it can’t successfully multitask routine built-in pda apps. Just start the music player, RSS Feeds, web browser over wi-fi, and try opening a contact and calendar (maybe to check / set an appointment). Guaranteed something will fail. And woe betide you if an incoming phone call gets added to the mix. Mark you, this is not just a phone, this is a SMART (not!) phone. Not to mention sundry oddities and quirks.
Worse, as designed with memory-hungry systems and limited (64 MB) program memory – not data storage – this inadequacy is predictable. DOH! SE’s pre-release advertising was misleading on this. Misundertanding caused by incompetence or deliberately misleading? Either way, it seems they now don’t give a horse’s a**. They’re abandoning the white elephant even before the 1-year manufacturer’s warranty runs out. Seems like a prime candidate for a global class-action suit.
I PURCHASED P990I A WEEK AGO.. AND NO SUPPORT FROM SONY…
SHIT……. I WILL NEVER EVER PURCHASE SONY DEVICE AGAIN IN FUTURE… NO DEVICE MEANS NOTHING WHICH HAVE LOGO OF SONY.
I agree with Nadeem, I bought a Sony Ericsson from an Internet Serves Provider, Vodacom, in South Africa Cape Town and The phone has given me endless frustration and there is no support from SE or my service provider and both suck. this obvious will encourage me to buy another Cell phone from a different Manufacturer preferably Nokia and a different service provider.