The Nokia N97 bug list.

Update: Nokia N97 11.2.021 firmware was released on July 1, 2009.

It’s been a week since the N97 arrived at my door, and yet during that time I’ve seen some strange things. And not strange in a good way either. So I’m making my official Nokia N97 bug post here and updating it as I see fit.

Current status of the Nokia N97: Lots of small bugs, nothing major like the stuff we saw in v10. To anyone running v10, make sure you update to the latest firmware via Nokia Software Updater.

The following is my list of N97 problems, bugs, and other irregularities. Note that after the latest firmware update (11.2.021), some things have shifted to the “Fixed” heading.

Home Screen

- The lock/unlock switch is still seriously buggy. A good amount of the time the phone will either NOT lock or NOT unlock even though the screen will flash. Come on, Nokia.

- The portrait/landscape wallpaper display is screwy. When you use a standard 300×640 vertical image as your background, it will not display correctly in landscape mode. Basically, instead of rotating the image 90 degrees, the phone will take the middle 300 pixels and make an 640×300 image out of it – meaning you get a nice blown-up image in landscape view. Lovely! Fix: when creating a wallpaper image, use a 640×640 image. See my N97 wallpaper post for more details.

- Hitting certain keyboard keys repeatedly causes the screen to freeze for a lengthy amount of time. Basically, whenever you hit a non-numeric key, the screen clears for a quick second, showing only the background and a broken side menu. Pressing the button repeatedly causes some kind of loop, which lags the phone to all hell. Try it with the Uppercase + top row of keys for a bit ‘o fun.

Browser

- No way to enter a url in fullscreen mode without exiting back to windowed view.

Software

- Music Player: Switching to another application while simultaneously playing several music files in a row messes up the progress bar. Instead of showing the current song’s progress, the bar will continually scroll from start to finish, cycling through all of the songs that were played outside of Music Player.

- The Messaging application sometimes shows only the title without any menu options. Instead, the phone just displays the leftover parts of the Home screen. The options are still there, and can still be activated by touch.

- The applications Boingo, Qik, and Joikuspot cannot be uninstalled.

- Deleting consecutive emails too quickly in Nokia Messaging using the delete key (with delete confirmation turned off) sometimes crashes the program. Update: The new version of Nokia Messaging (10.0.1.14) now shows a dialog box that says “Deleting” without actually deleting anything. It also freezes there unless you hit the Cancel button.

- Entering a note with the keyboard in Active Notes is extremely laggy.

Fixed in N97 Firmware Update 11.2.021

Final Notes

If you’ve found a bug, please add it in a comment below. Make sure you specify your phone model (RM-5xx) and software version (ie. 10.2.012). You can find your model/version by typing in *#0000# in the Dialer (or go to Settings -> Phone -> Phone mgmt -> Device updates). Thanks!