'Fixing' Flash Lite 3 on the Nokia E90
Published by Steve Litchfield at 6:15 UTC, June 4th 2008
You'll recall that the Nokia E90 Communicator recently received a major official firmware update, to v210.34.75, as reported by me here. This brought the E90 into a pretty mature state apart from the fact that Web's Flash integration seemed horribly broken, but only for some people. Read on for my investigation...
The really bizarre thing, as I say, is that for some people v210.34.75 worked properly, with Flash-enabled web sites rendering properly and YouTube (etc) videos playing, while others (including me) were left floundering with an almost useless browser that simply terminated itself whenever anything Flash-related was called upon. Which means virtually every major site these days...
What was especially interesting was that the problem manifested itself on my newly updated E90 with no user data on, no previous backups restored and with no memory card inserted. In other words, we can't blame the usual culprits - third party software, microSD conflicts and so on.
So what's left? I decided, on a hunch, to do a factory reset using the usual *#7370# sequence. And yes, I know that the Nokia Software Update had effectively done the same thing, starting the E90 with a clean internal disk and everything on defaults. But I was curious.
Web worked. It played Flash video files, it displayed complex Flash animations, and seemed almost 100% stable. Hmm.... I started installing my 30 or so (Nokia and) third party applications, bringing the E90 back up to the spec level I need for day to day smartphone use. You know, Quickoffice 5.0, Handy Safe, Internet Radio, Nimbuzz, Location Tagger, Sports Tracker and the rest...
As I installed, I'd stop every now and then and check that Web was still working. Yes. Video playback from YouTube wasn't as smooth as on the N95, but then the E90 has a larger screen to drive and slightly less graphics processing oomph. But at least it was working and not crashing.
I started running everything in sight, leaving it all going in the background and then trying Web video playback - it still worked.
So why on earth did this not work after the original v210.34.75 firmware update? I'm not completely sure, but here's my theory - do please jump in if you know enough to correct me....
After a wipe to factory settings or after a firmware update, the internal disk is basically empty. As the phone is powered on, a sizeable number of system working files are created for the first time, along with configuration files, all of which are added to or modified as you start using the device. In other words, the system area on the internal disk is both complex and always changing, in ways that you and I never get to see.
My theory is that at some point in S60's initialisation or when Web is first launched, the Flash Lite 3 modules are integrated - the OS and browser make a note of where to find them when needed and what capabilities are present. At this point, things sometimes go wrong. And sometimes go right. The situation seems to be binary - if Web and FL3 work fine straight after the update/hard reset then they'll carry on working forever more, whereas if they don't work at first then the system is 'broken' and you need to hard reset again.
The reason why FL3 sometimes integrates OK and sometimes doesn't, in my theory at least, is that we're talking about real time operating systems and complex interactions between all the different tasks, added to which you're likely to do things in a slightly different order each time in terms of keypresses and application launches/installs. It obviously doesn't take much to make FL3 on the E90 unstable, at least in this current OS build - it's ultimately down to an instability (the new name for 'bug', you know?....) in either S60 Web or Adobe's Flash Lite 3 code.
The bottom line? If Flash videos don't play in your E90's Web, then it's time to do your backups, hard reset it and try again! [footnote: the 'solution' has now been tested on several problem E90s and has worked each time]
Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 4 June 2008
Categories: Hardware, Miscellaneous
Platforms: S60 3rd Edition
News Discussion
My 2 cents for the reasons that this works is that the Flash libraries need to be initialized before you install a lot of third party applications or synchronize your phone with PCSuite for example. With this fix, the first thing you do after the format is checking whether or not Flash works. Since the internal disk is almost almost empty at that time, the libraries get initialized properly. And, since they were initialized properly, Flash will continue working even if you installing lots of other stuff afterwards
If you first install all your third party apps or maybe do a sync using PCSuite and then try to run Flash for the first time, for example by trying to play a video on Youtube, apparently something prevents the libraries from being installed correctly, causing a browser crash.
Mark.
The screen on the N95 8GB is too low in resolution so BBC iPlayer doesn't really work with it. Since the E90's resolution is considerably higher I think it will probably work. Could you please try it out, Steve?
Like Steve said before: it either works after a reformat or doesn't. In my case after reformatting and rebooting the browser still didn't display Flash content (it crashed as soon as the Flash player got loaded from a Youtube webpage). So I did another *#7370# and after that the browser played the Flash content happily. Now after restoring the backup I made and installing the applications it failed to restore (I wonder when Nokia is going to fix that) Flash content is still playing perfectly in the web browser.
Shame really. BBC - please wake up to the fact that S60 phones would like in on the iPlayer action! 8-)
Steve
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Originally Posted by slitchfield
GPS is fine. It's just that you'll have lost your access points with the upgrade. Check your data connection and check that Nokia Maps is using it for Assisted GPS etc.
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Steve
I also found that youtube mobile doesn't work..it launched real player but stuck at downloading and nothing get download. Youtube full version works fine.
Mail for exchange and company directory work fine..but after installing blackberry connect, company directory of mail for exchange cannot launch...
Any suggestions?
Even after resetting and reinstalling firmware, flash is not working in the browser. I checked the flash version that is installed in the media folder, the version is flashlite 2.0. Please help me in fixing this.