I’ve had this flagship Nokia smartphone for about six weeks now, and it has been a love hate relationship.  For the first couple of weeks I wanted to put it on the floor and stamp on it repeatedly.  Even basic core tasks like answering a call seemed anti intuitive and irritating.

Upgrading the firmware was a frustrating experience:  Even though other s60 users were happily reporting substantial improvements with firmware v11.x, attempts to update my phone from v10.x were met with a ‘upgrade not available’ message. 

However, many weeks later, and with v11 of the s60v5 platform, it is much improved, and many bugs have been fixed.  There are still some significant cons – the keyboard is impossible to read in bright light, the resistive touch and interface is clunky to say the least, and belies it’s Symbian origins.  It also ships with the old version of Nokia’s email client, and not the new, much improved Nokia Messaging suite. 

Overall it is an ‘OK’ device but the worrying thing for Nokia is that it is now getting on for 18 months since the original iPhone release, and Nokia still do not have a smartphone that can rival it.