When I got my Nokia E7, Nokia’s own updating software bricked the device – incredibly frustrating, since Nokia doesn’t care about The Netherlands anymore and has closed all Nokia Care Points in the country. This meant I had to send it in for repairs, which, as experience with companies has taught me, usually takes weeks. Luckily, Nokia made it possible to download firmware straight from their servers using third party tools, and thanks to a technique called dead phone flashing, it was incredibly easy to bring bricked (Symbian) Nokia phones back to life. Now that Nokia ships Windows Phone, however, such public access is no longer welcome, and as such, it has blocked third party access to its servers. Understandable, but major suckage for enthousiasts. On a related note, Accenture (the company managing Symbian development) has released an update for Nokia Belle FP1/2 devices. Yep.
Not sure if it allows the same access Navifirm had but I used the Nokia Care Suite last week to check available firmware on their servers and there appeared to be no access problems using that.
Nokia should just stop posting pre-release firmwares on Navifirm if they don’t want people getting them. The cache of old firmwares is invaluable for bricked devices.
There is no sense in this and only makes self servicing of your device more difficult.
You just said the reason for why they are doing this. There is sense in this, it’s just that it’s business-sense.
It might make business sense in the short term, but I wouldn’t be so sure about the long-term effects of this choice.
Anyway, I don’t like Nokia’s attitude lately and I think it has much more to do with Windows Phone ROMs being out in the open than with the negligible earnings related to servicing/repairing old devices.
Is it just me, or is it reality, that every time a company gets in bed with Microsoft they begin to act like them? I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t a result of contractual obligations (I know it was at Dell…).