The door opened to Feature Pack spanning upgrades?

[slitchfield]

Once again (Symbian's) David Wood's blog provides useful pointers to the future of the Symbian software world. In this post he discusses firmware upgrades and points out, specifically, that the old situation where firmware upgrades were limited by license to a particular OS Feature Pack level may not one day apply because of the way Symbian Foundation is open source and (commercial) license-free. Don't hold your breath, though, you're unlikely to ever see S60 5th Edition running on your old N95!

Read on in the full article.

would be nice to see a new update for the n96 the 5800 seems to be getting all the attention of late its like nokia have forgotten there so called flagship device

a new update would be good

I don't think that Symbian Foundation brings any changes to the current policy of firmware upgrades. There is enough work to get the new products work properly and start selling them and keep the released products in maintenance.

[sturgeon]

My N95 resents being called "old" Steve!

Its immaculate, loaded with great software and a fair bit better than most of the more recent emasculated junk you have reviewed.

s.

[slitchfield]

@sturgeon: Oh, your phone shouldn't take offense. And in my defense, I've called out the recent emasculations by Nokia in plain sight.... The N96, N79 and N85 are all horribly underpowered, IMHO.

The N95, N95 8GB and N82 were/are smartphone classics.

[Tzer2]

I don't think that Symbian Foundation brings any changes to the current policy of firmware upgrades.

The Symbian Foundation has no control over firmware at all, because they don't manufacture any devices.

The Foundation's only job is to develop the Symbian OS. It's entirely up to device manufacturers to offer firmware updates.

Please don't forget about the E90! The E75 sucks and I have absolutely no intention of "upgrading" to this so called new communicator.

[N/A]

The E75 is not positioned as an "upgrade" to the E90 by Nokia, nor is it positioned as a "communicator". And of course nothing requires you to switch to it, either, if you don't like it.