Wednesday, January 13, 2010

5800 FW Available with limited Kinetic Scrolling

Nokia just made a new firmware available for the Nokia 5800 XM.  A lot of the existing users have been waiting for this for a long long time.  Nokia has taken a lot of flack, justified in my opinion, for dragging their feet to fix a lot of the things missing/broken in their first mainstream touch device.  Apple and Android are eating Nokia's lunch in smart phones because they have been more innovative and faster at bringing meaningful updates to market.

I sure hope that Nokia starts changing its ways, although I do have to say that I am overall quite pleased with the phone.

Firmware 40 brings a few things to the phone so far that I have seen:

  1. Kinetic Scrolling (move around the page by flicking your finger) in many of the apps although it is sorely lacking the the normal device menus 
  2. New Home screen similar to the 5530 with a music player widget, 4 shortcuts and a contact carousel
  3. Better input option to allow one preferred method for portrait and other for landscape
  4. Camera seems a bit quicker to me
  5. Hopefully many many bug fixes (alarm bug, downloaded videos from feeds, corrupted podcast database, etc...)
Not included and disappointing:
  1. Updated webkit browser (still stuck at webkit 413 whereas Chrome uses 532.8). This will be needed to greatly improve the somtimes shoddy WRT experience.
  2. True Kinetic Scrolling in the device (eg, menus, better implemented in browser)
  3. More flexible input options for portrait and landscape (why can't  I choose mini querty for portrait and full querty for landscape?)
  4. More shortcuts in Homescreen
  5. Landscape Homescreen


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