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New N80 firmware - 4.0707.0.7

Nokia released the new 4.0707.0.7 firmware for N80 a little more than a week ago. I have now run this firmware on my N80 for a little over a week. And it's time to review what the pros and cons of this new firmware are. Do you really need it? Read my experiences with it and make up your own mind. The first thing I noticed with this firmware was the new active standby. Nokia has changed the font on the active standby making it larger and thinner. This makes the standby screen much easier to read and easier on the eye.

Rumor has it that this new firmware increases the battery standby life of the phone. This was the main reason I decided to try the firmware this early on. However my experience is that this isn't the case. My battery seems to last a shorter time now with the new firmware.

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I was positively surprised that the new firmware seems to have fixed the problem with the speed of the built in calendar. I have always felt that the calendar was sluggish, and very slow to use. It would "hang" for a short time every time you made an action. This seems to have been greatly improved in the new firmware. However it could easily be ever quicker.

I also have some trouble getting Telio fmc installed on the new firmware. I however also had trouble before upgrading, so I am uncertain that this actually is caused by the new firmware. Other people have reported the same trouble after upgrading, and Telio seems to think that this is the problem. I however think it's not a problem with the firmware, but a bug in their latest fmc version. Telio is looking into it now. Hopefully there will be a fix soon.

The built-in web browser has been patched for it's out of memory trouble. One can now load much larger pages without getting an out of memory error. This however is only "sand bag solution", seeing as the built in browser is based on KHTML and Konqueror and there for has no native out of memory protection support like for example the opera mobile browser. We will never see true out of memory protection on symbian 3rd edition.

The phone now enters standby mode 15 seconds after you close the slider.

The Kodak software has been removed.

There is a bug in this firmware that affects the sending of #XXXX# codes over the air. (Used by some operators for different reasons, for example to get the amount of money left on your prepaid). These codes obviously no longer work. I haven't been able to confirm that seeing as my operator doesn't implement these types of codes.