News · 12 Jan 2012 · MTW Editorial Team
I think that we all want to see Nokia succeed as a Windows Phone OEM but as for right now, the Nokia Lumia 800 is, to put it simply, a bug ridden mess. The company has already promised a relatively big software update that should fix the dreadful battery issues, poor camera quality in low light conditions and many other quirks that users have encountered since the devices launch in November. Unfortunately I’m sad to announce that the upcoming Firmware version 1600.2483.8107.11501 which is soon to be rolled out barely changes anything (It’s available on Nokia’s servers and can be flash on any handsets with some trickery in Nokia Care Suite 5). There are only three notable changes:
– The OS is updated to Build 7.10.8107.79
– The battery can finally be charged to its max 1430Mha capacity
– The Capacitive hardware buttons no longer light up unless the screen is set to auto-brightness or low (what a a stupid idea…why not do like everybody else and implement a simple 5secs timer in all modes?)
So what does it really mean to us? Well, the HORRIBLE missing battery status issue which is affecting one of my handsets and many more in the world is still not fixed. The camera software is unchanged and still defaults to Marco mode when first launched. It also still shoots crappy greenish shots in low light. The digitizer sensitivity is still too high, the sound quality out of the headphones still has a drastic lack of base and exhibits static when jumping from one track to another and finally the weird screen corruption issue (whole screen is shifted to the left for a few seconds or less) is still here.
Small update: I flashed back to the original 11414 firmware and the battery status is back but is totally bogus: It never reports the same status and the Diagnostics application doesn’t even detect it at all. What this means is that the firmware 11451 has definitely messed something up on the phone because it wasn’t like that when I first got the handset. Everything went south when the first official update was installed. Can somebody from Nokia please contact me ASAP?
UPDATE 2: In case people think that I’m constantly bitching… here’s some more: my second Lumia 800′s battery is perfectly functional but all the other issues still remain and that’s really the whole point of this post: Nokia apparently only fixed one single issue (max battery charge) in this much anticipated update and simply doesn’t want to ackowledge if some of the problems are hardware or software related.
Conclusion: big thumbs down to Nokia on this one as I think that most of these issue should have been fixed by now.
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