Nseries PC suite 'graduates'

[slitchfield]

The Nokia Nseries PC Suite (v2.0) has apparently 'graduated' from Nokia Beta Labs, effective from today. It's not clear whether today's download contains any further updates, so comments welcome if you're feeling brave. The download shown is only 8MB, so presumably this is just a stub that then grabs the rest. Anyone care to review it?

Read on in the full article.

[Steve_R]

Originally Posted by slitchfield

The download shown is only 8MB, so presumably this is just a stub that then grabs the rest. Anyone care to review it?

Yes, it is a stub. However, what is better about it over the standard PC Suite is that it lets you choose which applications you wish to install, such as music manager, video manager etc.

Last time I tried the N-Series PC Suite (about a week ago), it still did not support sync'ing with Visa Calendar though. Just a heads up to anyone who was looking to install this.

[neilhoskins]

Too right it's just a stub. 411MB and it's been downloading/installing all afternoon :-((( How can Nokia produce such elegant smartphone apps (eg Internet Radio, ShareOnline) and their desktop PC stuff is so bloated and horrible?

I have the beta installed and this stub tells me no updates are available. Maybe I should uninstall the beta first. However, this implies that maybe there are no changes from last beta version.

[Hardeep1singh]

411mb

I'm not letting that bloatware come anywhere near my PC. The regular PC Suite is doing a great job. I'll carry on with it.

HI All,

It took hell lot of time to download in vista ultimate 32 bit pc and it failed to install Nokia NSeries system utilities, Content copier and Nokia application installer on my pc.....

I've found that I don't need to do anymore than use the phone like a USB memory in mass storage mode, so no bloatware required. Time for Nokia to wake up on this one, the .net framework cannot be blamed as it should represent no more than a 35MB overhead, much less if the user already has it anyway (quite likely these days on Windows).

It seems to be down to lots of seperate development being converged behind a single launcher app.

Can do better.

[M|K-3]

I installed it and uninstall ed it right away.

As soon as I notices that it has NO Contact editor or even better no Contacts application at all...

A PC suite for a phone with no Contact and Messaging applications what a joke...

1v13o3 U a BEEESSSTTTT!!!!

[neilhoskins]

First impressions after an hour or so. Installed on an IBM desktop with a dual-core Pentium 4 2.8GHz, 512MB RAM, Windows XP. Connected to an N95-1 using bluetooth.

- Hugely bloated, sluggish, buggy, apps are slow to launch.

- Apps look very well thought-out for non-techie users.

- NSeries Video Manager now lets you set "high" quality for an N95, but I haven't had time to find out what this is. Video Manager then stopped working properly and won't let me back into 'settings'.

- Nokia photos was incredibly slow to launch, presumably doing some kind of indexing. Looks perfect for non-techie users but bizarrely seems to have incorporated Lifeblog and has indexed all my text messages on a timeline. It's a shame that the 'post to web' option has a manual setup: I would have expected better integration with Ovi Share at least, and ideally Flickr too.

- Download looks very interesting. It seems to be a completely different entity from the on-board 'Download!' and installs a new client on the handset. This is just the kind of thing that's been talked about to persuade non-techie users to install 3rd party apps. However, it's extremely buggy still: even the elevator bar in the window packed-up at one point.

Onto the integrated suite itself...

- Limited sync options: Oulook, Outlook Express, or Lotus, basically. I use Thunderbird so no use to me.

- Music Manager looks OK. I haven't looked at it for a while. I'm a firm believer that you should find one method you like and stick to it; this would be fine for most users. I think they should re-consider their pop-up that encourages you to use eAAC+ format, though: they should point-out that uPNP streaming won't work with the software provided if you do this.

- As previously pointed-out, where TF is contacts manager?! You used to be able to key-in contacts on your PC, with all the benefits of a big screen and qwerty keyboard, then sync to the phone. This seems to have gone, so if you don't have the aforementioned sync options you have to key-in all your contacts with the keypad or bluetooth keyboard.

CONCLUSION: enables the none- and semi-technical user to do the things that the rest of us do using other apps. Bloated and buggy, though, and where is contacts manager? Needs more sync options, too.

[neilhoskins]

Video manager is really pretty awful. If I drag and drop video files onto the phone icon, nothing seems to happen. The scan has somehow produced duplicate entries, and when you're browsing for a default folder, many non-techie users don't actually know that "My Documents" is really c:\Documents and Settings\myname.mydomain\My Documents.

Does anybody know when Ovi Sync will launch? Why use a local pc based sync like Nseries PC Suite when solutions like this move online, why tie yourself to huge bloatware on the pc when an online solution does the same! Do Nokia not learn from feedback that people do not want several huge apps installed just to sync data, they should concentrate on their core business not wasting time on re-inventing more pc applications, just a simple sync application will do, or learn from Apple and integrate all your services into one application that syncs with the phone.

[Sergey Zak]

The way I see it - not a PC Suite really, but more like iLife by Nokia.
You don't need to have Nokia phone to use it. Like you don't have to have iPod/iPhone to use iTunes/iPhoto.
More @ http://cubeover.blogspot.com/2007/12...revisited.html
And it did not cause me pain as per "bloated" etc - the whole install took 15 min.
As per lack of Contacts, I welcome the change - if you want to do it nicely, please use your PIM manager on PC (Outlook, Windows Address Book...).
Back in 2007 I wished Nokia Photo showed only photos, not messages, and Nokia did even better - now you could choose what to show in the TimeLine.
Come on guys, it's not so much about phones (did you notice you can't send/receive messages on PC?) as for organizing you digital life.
Rip photos/Mix/Burn/Share/Print the whole lifecycle is there, with a very lean navigation model.
On a PC! No Mac needed. Hurray N-series team!
My photos never been so accessible on a PC.

This must be the worst software Nokia has ever released: poor focus, terrible execution.

(It might be the worst software anyone has released - and I remember OpenDoc, and the original WordPerfect for Windows.)

Nokia needs to listen to REAL users again, not "digital lifestyle" marketing fanboys. I will now be spending Sunday afternoon uninstalling this from my wife's PC and reinstalling the PC Suite that works.

[Sergey Zak]

It would have been more useful if you'd describe what does not work for you in this suite. REAL reviewers do that. I hope it's not the omitted functionality (Contacts Editor, Messaging)? Anyway, the Nokia PC Suite 6.83 is at the core of this product, so it should contain the same ...erm..."features", as that very version