A question that often gets asked is: "Will my Nokia ABCD be upgradeable to S60v3 Feature Pack 1 or 2?"
We’ve been told numerous times: no, no and NO.
Financially it makes sense. A few engineers would have to spend their time to make sure a new OS would work on an old phone. Why would Nokia spend money and not expect anything in return?
T-Mobile Dash (HTC Excalibur) owners recently got the good news that they will be able to upgrade to Windows Mobile 2006. Pricing hasn’t been announced. I wouldn’t be surprised to see customers being charged a fee, but that’s just speculation on my part.
People who buy prebuilt computers don’t expect Microsoft to mail them a DVD every time a new version of their OS is released. Most people buy a new computer when it is time to upgrade, but there are a few who like their machine enough to go out and purchase that new Vista DVD. Apply this similar purchasing model to different versions of S60 on our mobile. Most of us will buy new phones that have the latest version of S60 on it. What about people who don’t want a new phone? Why can’t Nokia sell upgrades to those people?
I spoke with Darla Mack recently and I point blank asked her: Would you pay for S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 for you current phone? The answer was a definite yes. I know it’s something I would do too.
Let’s play with some numbers. Imagine Nokia sold 1,000,000 N73’s. One percent of those users are extremely hard core. They love their phone more than their significant other.
1% of 1,000,000 is 10,000. These 10,000 customers pay $30 to get the latest version of S60. That’s $300,000. Money that can be poured back in to research and development.
I’m not a developer. I wouldn’t know how difficult it would be to make S60v3FP2 work on my E61 or everyone else’s N73. If a Nokia developer could let the community know it would be greatly appreciated.
What do you guys think?