DonDino's dashboard

Hi mate,

as mentioned previously, with the help of a Nokia engineer we've concluded this is a hardware problem that seems to have affected a very small batch of phones. The solution is to send it back for repair mentioning it's a power fault, and Nokia will replace it immediately.
That's what I did, and the N95 I have now is faultless and works perfectly even with VoIP and video streaming running all the time.

The N95 was Nokia's best phone until the N97 came along, and it's one of the best phones ever. This problem only affected a very small number of phones sold, and a replacement makes the problem go away. The N95 is far from being any kind of 'total failure' as you claim. – DonDino, on July 12, 2009 11:56

Further info on this issue:

It seems the handset switches to GSM only when the other calling party is on GSM (or a landline), but stays on 3G if the other party is also using a 3G network and phone.

I just had a phone call from a friend who I know uses a 3G phone on a 3G network, and for the whole 18 minutes of the call my N95 stayed on 3G mode. However, as mentioned above, it seems to always switch to GSM about 1 to 2 minutes into a call when I ring a landline.

If this is the case, this must be an undocumented, but very clever, feature of this handset, as it should noticeably increase battery life!

Hi Daniel,

no it doesn't say anything, the data connections are dropped on the switchover simply because GSM cannot have an active data connection at the same time as a voice call.
So, for example, having the VoIP function of the phone enabled over 3G, what I see when it switches to GSM is the GSM antenna symbol appear in place of the 3G symbol, underneith it the connection symbol changes to the one that means 'connection on hold' and the VoIP symbol disappears.

I am on the O2 network in the UK, and I had this issue with my previous N95 that resulted faulty (for a totally unrelated issue) and ended up being sent for replacement. So that's two N95-1's I've had this with, but all on the same network. – DonDino, on December 14, 2008 03:22

Hi Jog,

yes it needs to go for replacement as we've established that it's a fault that cannot be repaired. When you take it in or send it to Nokia, make sure you mark it as a 'No Power' fault. If you do not and they think it's a software fault, they will just re-flash it and send it back to you.

Regards,
Dino – DonDino, on December 11, 2008 13:34

Hi Jog,

yes it needs to go for replacement as we've established that it's a fault that cannot be repaired. When you take it in or send it to Nokia, make sure you mark it as a 'No Power' fault. If you do not and they think it's a software fault, they will just re-flash it and send it back to you.

Regards,
Dino – DonDino, on December 11, 2008 13:34

Hi all,

I have finally received a new handset today. From the first look and touch it seems to be problem-free, although a few more days of testing will hopefully corroborate that.

A great big THANK YOU to Dustin for all his help and support, and to all of you who contributed valuable information.

Regards,
Dino

Hi Luiz,

when you take the phone back to Nokia, make sure to tell them it's NOT a software problem, but a 'No Power' problem. It seems Nokia techs only see the fault description and take a pre-determined action without actually checking and testing the phone before and after the repair.

If they see 'software problem' on the fault description passed to them by you or by the Nokia agent, they will just re-flash the firmware, so make sure they see a 'No power' fault instead. – DonDino, on November 18, 2008 17:23

Hi Luiz,

when you take the phone back to Nokia, make sure to tell them it's NOT a software problem, but a 'No Power' problem. It seems Nokia techs only see the fault description and take a pre-determined action without actually checking and testing the phone before and after the repair.

If they see 'software problem' on the fault description passed to them by you or by the Nokia agent, they will just re-flash the firmware, so make sure they see a 'No power' fault instead. – DonDino, on November 18, 2008 17:23

Hi Dustin,

the reason I have not contacted Nokia Support Center so far is that I was led to believe I can only deal with O2 directly and not Nokia. The first thing I did was walk into a Nokia Shop, where the assistant there told me that since I had bought the phone from O2 on a contract, Nokia could not help me, and that only O2 could deal with it. Should I happen to speak to a Nokia representative soon, I will mention this and get a clear picture of what the truth really is - and if I find out the Nokia Shop assistant was wrong to tell me that, I'm going back there to call him on it! – DonDino, on October 22, 2008 17:07

Hi Grbo,

Dustin would be more qualified to answer this, as he is our helpful resident Nokia employee in this forum. Let's wait to hear if he has any suggestion.

However as you mention yourself, with the phone out of warranty, I am not sure how Nokia would act on it. You said it has been out for service twice... Was it Nokia engineers that looked at it or independent technicians? Perhaps you can give it to a Nokia repair point along with the repair instructions linked above in Asit's reply. – DonDino, on October 22, 2008 08:09

Hi Byron,

this is most definitely not a software problem and Nokia repair centres should not be given instructions that it is such, as they will only reflash it and think it's been repaired.
The second time I took mine in for a repair, the shop clerk marked the fault as 'No Power', and desribed it in more detail, and they said they would replace the phone (I'm still waiting for it...). – DonDino, on October 21, 2008 10:56

I'd like to emphasize Frank's remark about temperature, as I mentioned it as well in a previous post (not sure if on this thread or a different one).

I too noticed that the phone was warmer than normal just before every time it crashed. More over, it seemed to take a lot longer to recover from the crash (i.e. successfully reboot) when I was indoors in a warm or heated environment, rather than when I was outdoors. When I was out and about, here in (usually) cold Manchester, England, it used to reboot quickly, but inside a centrally heated house, I would need to leave it switched off for at least 15-20 minutes before trying again. – DonDino, on October 17, 2008 14:46

I phoned the O2 Shop yesterday and they told me that my phone has been marked for replacement, but that the replacement had not arrived at the shop yet, and that it shouldn't be too long.

If I don't hear anything by Monday, I'll phone Nokia Customer Support and see if they can dig out some information about it and perhaps speed it up, as by Monday it will already have been two weeks since I took the phone to them for repair.

It has always done that, ever since July when I bought it.

The thing is I didn't use much of the aforementioned features at first, I started using them gradually, so in the beginning I thought it was normal to crash every now and then, but eventually when I saw that it crashed consistently when using these features I realised there was something wrong.
I also went on holiday in the meantime, so that's another reason why I didn't take it for repair or seriously looked up the problem on the internet any sooner. – DonDino, on October 10, 2008 20:31

Last time I gave it for repair, it took 3 working days, but all they did then was to re-flash it.

Today was the 3rd working day since I took it for repair again. I phoned the O2 shop and they said it wasn't back yet. They will phone me when it comes in.
I'm just a bit worried because O2 has a bad reputation with repairs, with phones getting delayed or lost and replacements being out of stock and untraceable. Hope my transaction will be more straightforward.

Regarding your comment about now knowing of 5 users with this problem... do you have any information on the other 3? And is this going to trigger Nokia to investigate the problem on a wider scale? Or does it take more incidents for this to take place? Of course you are already being an immense help with looking into this and we are grateful! – DonDino, on October 09, 2008 20:25

To Arun:
My N95 is now for the second time with the Nokia repair guys, we'll see how it goes this time.
With regards to software testing, it's a good idea to do it before you part with your phone to send it to repair.
As Dustin said, you need to run the Nokia Software Updater program that comes with the phone in a CD, and let it update your phone again. Perhaps it's a good idea to make separate back-ups of your memory, messages, contacts etc before that.
After that, test it. If it works OK, then start restoring your back-ups one by one. After each restore, check to see whether it still works.
Then start installing your applications again one by one (if you had any installed). Again test after each application install to see if it still works.
This way you may find the culprit.

That said, I re-flashed my phone several times, and tried to film immediately after reflashing (i.e. with the phone in factory condition), and it still froze, so no software problem for me :-(

To Dustin:
I too know several people with N95s who do not have these problems (or any problem at all, for that matter). The problem is, all of them are not heavy users of the phone's features. They use it almost exclusively for voice calls. If this is the typical behaviour seen by a big percentage (the majority perhaps?) of N95 users, then this kind of freezing problem may be more prevalent than we think but it doesn't show perhaps simply because most people don't use the functions that cause the problem to appear.

But still, if you have never heard of this before, then me and now Arun we *are* an unlucky bunch!!

Hi Dustin,

thank you for the clarification.

I don't pretend to know very much about the workings of cellphones or even to fully understand these streaming issues, but seeing your point about streaming as a general function the phone performs on all these occasions... couldn't we expand it even further and say that even on a normal phone call (GSM), the handset is streaming audio from the network so we should expect it to freeze on normal calls as well?

Or standard calls don't reach into what you mean by streaming?

Thanks for the hint, I will take the phone to the O2 (network) shop Monday and I will specifically ask them to tag it as you said.
Last time they put down 'Software fault' in the 'Fault' field, but they did write down a concise description like 'handset crashes in video calls, internet phone, etc' on the 'Fault description' field.

I'm guessing the Nokia repair guys only cared about the 'Fault' field, ignoring the description?

Oh, and I've emailed you at the address you provided as requested :-)

Further testing leads me to believe that the phone begins crashing when it goes warmer than it probably should be.

Last night I was at a friend's house and had the VoIP over WiFi switched on all the time on standby. At one point, I grabbed the phone to use it to test my friend's new WiFi router, and it was quite warm (not very hot, but distinctly warmer than usual), then as soon as I started pressing buttons the phone crashed immediately. After that, it just wouldn't start again, it kept showing the NOKIA logo on screen. I removed the battery to turn it off and kept it off for about half an hour till it cooled down, then as if nothing had happened, it turned back on just fine.

To Dustin and other Nokia employees who are kindly monitoring and providing helpful feedback in these forums: Do you think my theory is valid, that when using certain cpu-intensive functions the phone may be getting too warm (at least on the interior) and shutting down/crashing for this reason?
I will be handing it over to O2 (again) today, so I would like to present them with something more solid to work on this time.

Following up on my post, I have to report that my phone has not been repaired, which sheds a rather unreliable light on Nokia's tech guys, or at least to this company called 'Anovo UK Repairs', whom Nokia contract out to repair their phones.

I tried watching videos on YouTube last night, the phone crashed every time. Also tried filming, crashed after 22 seconds only. Did they think they had to *improve* the crashing time? LOL

As O2 is having 3G data outage, I haven't been able to test the problems related to 3G data transfer/streaming, although the WiFi tests do seem conclusive...

I've opened a new thread here:
http://getsatisfaction.com/nokia/topi...

to discuss the causes of the crashing problem mentioned above.

As for someone mentioning that Nokia knows about this problem, how is it then that they didn't fix my phone (it came back with exactly the same problem)?