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.