Firmware updates officially stopped for P990, W950 and M600

[slitchfield]

No new firmware is planned for the Sony Ericsson P990 and W950 after 'R6D23', released two weeks ago. The last firmware release for the M600 was 'R6A16'. Explaining the termination, there's an official statement below from Niklas Sivander, Head of Product Management, Open OS.

Read on in the full article.

[ratza]

This means that either the last FW version is perfect, or they intend to step forward to UIQ 3.1

[puterman]

"Perfect" in this context would mean that it's stable enough for them to get away with not fixing any more issues.

The P990 story has been long and tragic, all based on one unfortunate decision: to implement too many new features at once in a new device. They should have known better, but at least they learned a lesson, as admitted in the statement.

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[ares]

Steve, thanks for publishing this!

Engadget will follow soon

With about 1.5 years of warranty remaining, SE's decision to stop further fw development for the P990 is unacceptable from the consumers point of view. There are still serious bugs with both the P990 fw and the PCSuite programs and the state of the P990 is nowhere "solid" as SE claims. SE clearly admits that they made a serious error in the design of theP990 but I fail to see why the consumer who bought this phone in good faith should have to pay for SE's mistake. This is just wrong, unethical and unprofessional.
SE knew about these problems since they already stopped production of P990 several months ago but abandoning support while all the P990s are still under warranty and with serious bugs in the fw is just plain stupid and incomprehensible to me and tells a great deal about SE's commitment to its products.

[Sergey Zak]

Surely this means they lack resources (talented programmers).
They will just re-focus now on P1i and move on to the next thing that will bring the cash in. Fixing old stuff is probably not the best bet for a hardware company. It is good for service company. As for me, I'm happy I skipped this beta of new Symbian/UIQ platform. What worries me is that there were no compatibility with previous (UIQ) programs. Microsoft proved that this is needed to be successful. Then again, MS is not a hardware company...

[ares]

Guys, digg this

http://digg.com/software/SE_to_stop_...P990_W950_M600

[jah]

We should fight battles we can win

Now that SE have stated that Symbian 9.1 + UIQ3 was a very hard for them we should seek assurances that they are better equipped to deal with Symbian 9.3/9.5 and UIQ3.x otherwise we will NOT buy any of their Smartphones. Realistically we can not reverse the decision to stop supporting the P990 etc but we can make it clear that we will NOT buy the successor products unless they make sure they are in a solid state before launch. AND they should involve us a lot more in testing.

[Rafe]

Personally I feel this is being over egged by a vocal minority. Not suprisngly the people who don't have problems don't complain. I do understand the frustration, but commercial realities come into play here. I suspect a relatively small minority of users upgrade their firmware after they buy their phone. There's a balance to be drawn.

That said I'd agree that it would be better if any remaining big bugs were fixed. I think some people would do well to consider what a bug is too - some of the lists that have been sent to me (thanks for all your emails on this subject by the way) have been very liberal with term.

Its also notable that this really only applies to the P990. The M600 and W950 seem to be generally considered more problem free (personally the M600 is absolutely fine for me). This bodes well for the future devices.

It maybe that more RAM should have been included from the beginning (I would imagine many of the problems people have are not bugs as such, but shortage of memory because they as power users are more likely to push the device). However it easier to be wise in hindsight.

[tnleeuw]

I could accept their decision, if the latest firmware was anyway near 'stable', and even then to stop at this point would have been much like a broken promise.

However, what makes this decision totally unacceptable for me, as a user of this phone, is that the latest firmware released for the phone has many many regressions compared to the previous firmware, for the users point of view, and there is no way that users can revert to previous firmwares!

I like the phone itself very much, but in it's present form it is still rather unstable. And the latest firmware, which I haven't installed yet, seems even more unstable in a number of respects.

Some of the regressions should be really easy to fix, too.


So an official response at this point in time should at least have been on the line of 'we are considering your complaints and what can be done to fix issues' rather than leaving users with a text-editing component unable to accept more than 2000 characters in 2 paragraphs, and saying that "This is it, it is over for you guys, you now have a device as stable as it can be within the limits of it's memory".


Regards,

--Tim

[martinharnevie]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

I think the P990 will end up damaging SE for the next 3-5 years. Anyone who bought one will be unlikely to buy another SE smartphone, and anyone who waited for it's release will probably not wait for another SE smartphone!

I beg to differ. I know sufficiently many P990 users very happy with the phone to conclude that it's far from as bad as many people in the active Symbian user community are making it out to be. After all, whereas it might have more than it fair share of problems relative to Symbian standards, it's still far less than almost any WM or PPC device...

[buster]

Maybe the P990 is not *so* bad, but it clearly does still have numerous problems, judging by what is being said. The fact that SE have decided to effectively drop all support for what is, for some users at least, a fairly new phone, is hardly what one could call customer-friendly, and will not encourage people to go out and buy their latest offerings.

Yes, they made a terrible mistake with the P990, but the fact is, this could be remedied by continuing development of the firmware. I have had a P910 for 3 years now, and have been very happy with it, but I would certainly not consider replacing it with another SE phone anytime soon....

[martinharnevie]

P910 is a third iteration on the v7/UIQ2 platform. That's one reason why it's so great. The first iteration, the P800, was not a great phone and, just like P990, was delayed for about 3 quarters of a year.

The P1i & W960 represent the third iteration on the v9/UIQ3 platform, whereas P990 was the first iteration. This contributes to pretty good confidence that the P1i will be a great phone.

[ares]

Here´s El Reg trashing SE actions on this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06...firmware_snub/

And engadget article

http://www.engadgetmobile.com/2007/0...w950-and-w600/