Musing About The Latest Eseries and Purchasing FP2 For Them

      With the announcement that the E66 and the E71 will come with FP1 raised a few eyebrows, especially since these are high-end Eseries devices and that the recently released N78 has FP2. The response was that FP2 hasn't had time to mature and isn't stable enough for business and/or power users who demand reliability. I get the logic behind this to some extent, but it just leaves more to be desired. On the other hand there are possible reasons why Nokia might not be interested in doing this:

• It will make the phones too future-proof, hurting them on sales in the long term.
• If FP2 requires specific hardware, the cost of adding FP2 compatible hardware makes the final price less attractive.
• It would set a bad precedent for people who already have an older Eseries or even Nseries device and would demand that they get the FP2 treatment as well.
• Having one phone running FP1 or FP2 makes developing fimrware upgrades more tedious.

     So is there a middle ground in between? Sure. Nokia should think hard about making FP2 available for purchase, at least for the Eseries. I remember there was similar talk that Nokia should make people purchase a firmware upgrade for the N95-3 when there was a drought of real updates for 8 months. This suggestion was made to motivate the people responsible to come up with an updated FW. That didn't happen, but that was inspiration for me to think about this.

     Now why the Eseries and not the Nseries? Because the Eseries crowd tend to be more willing on purchasing essential upgrades that will help them with their work. Anything that will make their phone perform better and thus make it easier or faster to perform their work is an acceptable cost. Now of course their is a limit for the price of a FP upgrade. I tend to think that a FP upgrade shouldn't cost more than $50. Of course they can make this available 6 months from now, because by that time the FP2 has become more reliable, and no major Eseries phone would likely be announced. The Eseries tend to have longer life cycles (The E61 was announced first half of 2006, and the E61i was a marginal upgrade that came in 2007), therefore it shouldn't hurt the long-term sales of the Eseries anyway. The whole system of purchasing can be implemented in the Nokia Software Updater as well.

     It's also important to note that eventually software or services will be announced by Nokia or 3rd party developers that will exclusively work on FP2 whether we like it or not, so by enabling the newer Eseries devices (E51, E66, E71, and E90) to run FP2, there will be more audience towards those higher-end services. Of course the issue would remain on whether this should be done with the older Nseries or not. What do you think? Is there a better solution to this? What would the difficulties be?

Comments

[Ricky Cadden]

It's nothing new: http://www.symbian-guru.com/welcome/2008/03/paid-upgrades-could-be-solution-for-fp2-on-older-devices.html

But still a great point to revisit, especially, as you point out, as the E71/E66 both came out after the current trickle of N78s and 6220s coming from Finland.

[Amir A.]

I remember there was talk about it before, but as you pointed out, it's good to have it brought up again. Once again, I stress that this should wait a few months until the bugs and kinks are ironed out from FP2.