Nokia N97 firmware upgrade (and update for E71)

I don’t have a Nokia N97 but people are asking me about flashing their phones and I’m just collecting a few links etc here for them. This is getting asked more often now version 2/20 is out.

Basically the procedure is the same as my earlier article here except the upgrade is done over the air through menus seems to be the recommended procedure.

As usual the UK is slow at getting updates. For the N97 you can’t set to generic UK product code yet as no carrier has stepped up the plate (yet). To see valid codes look at this All About Symbian article.

The other thing you need to do after the upgrade is to send the settings for Internet and MMS from your carrier. For example Vodafone UK N97 is here and E71 is here.

And remember, backup, backup, backup. I would recommend getting data out in a format other than Nokia backup if you can as an extra precaution.

Open Source Inside

Following on from my introductory post I thought I’d talk a little bit more about how our IT is run.

As a young organisation we have had the chance to build our IT infrastructure from scratch and my predecessor Suran Naidoo (interim Head of IT) did a sterling job with his team to pull it together.

The tenets that were set down for the infrastructure were that we didn’t need to invest a large amount of capital, that it was software as a service (SaaS) or platform as a service and that we favoured open source wherever possible.

So the infrastructure that we have built is largely outsourced to a range of partners. The majority of servers are RedHat Enterprise Linux or Ubuntu Server with a few Windows servers thrown in for internal purposes. These servers are virtualised around VMWare and we have dipped our toe in the water a little with AWS (Amazon Web Services).

The groupware/collaboration is largely handled by Google Apps – we use this for email and some document collaboration.

We use a range of SaaS services – SAP Business By Design, Salesforce, Spigit, Wordpress.

Our websites are largely built around the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) along with a range of other products such as Bugzilla, Mailman, MediaWiki and soon Drupal.

On the desktop side we use Microsoft Windows XP/Vista and Mac OS X with a smattering of Ubuntu. At present we largely use Microsoft Office, and the majority of people browse with Firefox or Safari but Chrome is coming up fast also.

It was a bit of a challenge pulling this altogether – especially in a short time frame. We also found some open source software and SaaS platforms weren’t quite as ready as they claimed to be and had to change course. We didn’t quite achieve our goal of no servers on site, but we do have a lot less than any other site that I have worked on.

Stay tuned for future episodes where I’ll talk about my thoughts on the cloud, choosing open source vs closed source, how do you live open source when you are doing SaaS.

IT at the Symbian Foundation

I’m Ian McDonald and I’m Head of IT at the Symbian Foundation. I come from a strong open source background and have used open source software since the 1980s.

I started using open source software doing my undergraduate degree at the University of Waikato. I used to download software from around the world and soon got told off for using too much of New Zealand’s bandwidth (It was 2.4Kbits/sec for the whole country!!).

I’ve deployed open source software at a number of large corporates including building work management software using largely open source tools at NZ’s largest telco in the 1990s.

I have also served on the committee and was then president of WLUG which was one of New Zealand’s strongest open source societies (despite the name it was far more than Linux).

Personally I’ve also got code into projects such as ttcp, iperf and my largest contribution is into the Linux kernel for a new networking protocol DCCP. Hopefully I’ll also start working on the Symbian platform as well in the not too distant future!

At the Symbian Foundation we use a lot of open source software internally and I’m looking to increase this further. In a number of posts coming up I’ll outline how we use open source and what are the challenges for running IT on open source.

(Also published here on the Symbian blog)

Flashing your Firmware on Nokia phones

Now that I work for the greatest phone OS organisation in the world I want to fiddle with my phones a bit more.

At work I have a Nokia E71 supplied by Vodafone. Vodafone is a great company (thanks for releasing a Femtocell - I can use my phone at home now!!) but, like most carriers, they don't release firmware upgrades quickly. So I went and fiddled and broke my phone a few times and decided I should document it so it doesn't hurt you as much as me!!

Firstly all of these instructions assume you are using Windows. The tools don't work on OS X/Linux sorry. So here are steps I went through.

Step 1: Back your phone up in a couple of ways. As I found out later I couldn't reuse my Nokia backup directly. So use the Nokia backup and make sure any contacts, photos etc are also pulled off. You will lose everything in your phone memory during the upgrade.

Step 2: Find your Nokia product ID for a non carrier version of your phone using your favourite search engine. For the UK silver Nokia E71 it is 0567045. For UK Black N97 it is 0585162. (NB I haven't tested this process on N97 but should work)

Step 3: Use Nemesis Service Suite to change the product ID of your phone to this generic one.

Step 4: Run the Nokia update software and it will now update as it thinks you have a generic phone, rather than carrier locked. This process will take a while and do make sure your phone has lots of charge first.

Step 5: If you want to, you can try restoring your backup. Unfortunately for me this bricked my phone (made it inoperable). I had to do a complete reset via holding down *, 3 and green and then turning the power on. This is a tricky key combination on the small keyboard and you need to hold it for about a minute too. I believe this will also work on other Nokia phones also. NB This of course wipes all data... After that I reapplied the Nokia update to get the default settings back.

Step 6: I recovered the data I had lost using Noki which can be found here. This is a great piece of software which is useful in it's own right. NB N97 is not listed as a supported device.

Enjoy the features of your upgraded phone. For me the big benefits were that the E71 camera is now OK (as opposed to being useless with huge banding) and the phone stopped crashing, and battery life improved.

Settling into London now

We are settling into London now and enjoying the life here. We have got broadband again so can start sending updates to people etc now.

Today we were in Mayfair as I had a job interview. Amazing to see all the Bentleys, Rolls Royces and Bugattis alongside just common Porsches and Mercedes. We also wandered past Nobu (restaurant for the stars) and one of Gordon Ramsay's restaurants.

We are settling down in our house now and have put together most of our Ikea furniture. We love the East Twickenham/Richmond area down by the river and are enjoying our place. So much good food around also and so little stomach capacity!!

Office 2007 SP2

Office 2007 SP2 is out now and has some great changes – like support for OpenOffice and PDF out of the box.

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/04/28/now-available-microsoft-office-2007-service-pack-2.aspx

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953195

However sometimes it won’t pick up new emails in Outlook if running in cached mode – which is the default and recommend mode so watch out for this:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968773/

I imagine this may catch out some early adopters out so just be aware. Microsoft won’t push this out for another 90 days so hopefully they will have a fix before then.

Tweeting now

I'll now tweet more than post here so if you want my updates on tech then follow me here.