SonyEricsson drop support for P990i, W950 & M600

[kingrob]

Here is the SonyEricsson response :

Hi all,
Sorry for the delay in getting this info. No new firmware is planned to be released for the P990 and W950 after R6D23 released on June 15, 2007 via the Sony Ericsson Update Service. The last firmware release for the M600 was R6A16.
I have got an official statement from Niklas Sivander who is the Head of Product Management, Open OS.
So here it goes:

"These firmware releases meet the requirements of bug fixes prioritized by our operator customers and the Customer Services organization within different markets. The decision to freeze the P990, W950 and M600 firmware versions at this point has been made based on meeting these requirements. As with any phone project, no product is ever completely flawless. Any remaining issues are of course unfortunate, but we feel that with the level of quality on the latest P990 firmware we now have a good, solid product.

Due to all heavy features in P990, the need for RAM memory has grown. When running multiple memory-consuming programs at the same time, the available RAM memory runs low and sometimes results in the memory manager closing down one of the applications. We have been working on improving memory management during the whole lifecycle of the P990. The low RAM memory situation for the P990 will unfortunately remain for the heaviest users, and would not be fixed by a new firmware update since it's hardware related. Multi-tasking on the P990 however works satisfactory provided that you don't run too large and memory-consuming programs at the same time. Performance improvements have indeed been made for the new P1 phone compared to P990 and the user RAM available for applications has been increased with >400%, significantly improving multi-tasking performance and application behavior so that you can run a lot heavier programs simultaneously.

Many users are comparing the P990 with the stable and relatively problem-free predecessor P910, which was an excellent smartphone. The P910 was based on an earlier Symbian OS and UIQ platform version with only an incremental software development update from the P900 (Symbian OS 7.0, UIQ 2.1), which made the development work a lot smoother at the time. With the P990, the Symbian OS capabilities have however expanded quite significantly and as with any major platform update, this was expected to introduce some new issues to solve. Sony Ericsson however underestimated the complexity of the development work for UIQ 3 and it took longer than expected to implement and quality assure things like the platform security mechanisms, the multimedia framework and other advanced connectivity aspects like 3G, videotelephony and WiFi. It has been a tough journey for all of us. Please extend my thanks and appreciation to the user and developer communities for all their patience, support and feedback which has helped us identify bugs and improve both existing and upcoming products."

In addition to Niklas's comment above, I have managed to get hold of a list of the major bug fixes as required by operators and Customer Services and solved as of R6D23, I am going to filter out the user bugs and translate some of the stuff into a non tech jibberis before I publish them here.

Sony Ericsson has not found any memory leakage problem in the platform or product in its testing of the latest firmware. Those additional third party applications that users may download should be ok and not create memory leakage provided that they have been developed according to UIQ 3 standard guidelines but it is up to the developer in question to ensure correct development and testing procedures of their apps.

The comments about new bugs from our forums and http://uiq3.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Phones/P990i#Known_Bugs having been introduced in R6D23 have been forwarded to the development projects and will be reviewed over the coming days and I will try and get some comments back to the forums from product development on them.

Bugs reported on this forum and from the P990 wiki at sourceforge has been sent to the development organization. Many of the reported bugs have been fixed as of R6D23.

I appreciate your continued patience on this topic and fully understand your frustration and disappointment on our lack of communication and clarifications up until now.

Cheers
Johan

Here is the link : http://developer.sonyericsson.com/thread.jspa?threadID=39963&start=105&tstart=0

 

[NoADSLyet]

So Rob does this mean I must cancel my order pronto?

 

[kingrob]

So Rob does this mean I must cancel my order pronto?

Yes.

SonyEricsson has decided to drop support for their 'flagship' phone after one year - I still can't believe it.

Absolutely shocking.

 

[NoADSLyet]

AAW well. Its just a phone,a simple phone, A fsucking phone. No loss

 

[kingrob]

I feel cheated by SonyEricsson. Had to pay an extra R999 for the 'privelage' to get one early and now you can buy one for R2000 - that sucks.

 

[Piesang]

I feel cheated by SonyEricsson. Had to pay an extra R999 for the 'privelage' to get one early and now you can buy one for R2000 - that sucks.

That's technology bru. The N95 is almost touching the R6000 mark.

 

[MyDraadloos]

I feel cheated by SonyEricsson. Had to pay an extra R999 for the 'privelage' to get one early and now you can buy one for R2000 - that sucks.

If you insurance is up to date then I can always drive over it for you ...... then you can get a HTC or Nokia ;-)

 

[BeVonk!]

New phones are developed and released so fast these days that manufacturer patch support cannot last longer than 12 to 18 months. It sucks but we should plan for this. I don't like having a phone for more than 12 months anyway. After 12 months it feels like a Model T Ford. The Nokia N95 will go the same route. I'm waiting for the E90 - which will, within a year, be replaced by the E90i. A two year contract on one phone is not on anymore. These contracts should be brought down to 12 months. Phones will become like bars of soap.

 

[kingrob]

New phones are developed and released so fast these days that manufacturer patch support cannot last longer than 12 to 18 months. It sucks but we should plan for this. I don't like having a phone for more than 12 months anyway. After 12 months it feels like a Model T Ford. The Nokia N95 will go the same route. I'm waiting for the E90 - which will, within a year, be replaced by the E90i. A two year contract on one phone is not on anymore. These contracts should be brought down to 12 months. Phones will become like bars of soap.

But the P990i has only been out for 10 months!?

*I agree, had 1-year contracts in England, but here in good ol' SA, well....say no more.

 

[Vlad_M]

New phones are developed and released so fast these days that manufacturer patch support cannot last longer than 12 to 18 months. It sucks but we should plan for this. I don't like having a phone for more than 12 months anyway. After 12 months it feels like a Model T Ford. The Nokia N95 will go the same route. I'm waiting for the E90 - which will, within a year, be replaced by the E90i. A two year contract on one phone is not on anymore. These contracts should be brought down to 12 months. Phones will become like bars of soap.

The whole idea of the "free" phone is stupid - this is the part that locks you in for a two year period, since you have to pay off your "free" phone, and if it was done over a year, you would be paying in excess of 1k for a T240 type contract. ICASA at one point investigated banning these subsidys, but as with everything else they do, that flopped.

 

[Spice]

Thank you for dropping the P990

Personally I'm glad the P990 is no more, to be realistic it promised too much but delivered too little! I should know because I own one (yes I regret this every day!).

Previously I owned a W800i (excellent phone) which was excellent for day to day leisure activities including music (100%), camera, PC remote and off course making calls. However due to the fast progression of my career I had to have a tool that would have more business tools so I bought a Dell PDA X50. All was well, especially with it's windows based OS but the issue of having my w800 and X50 felt a bit bulky so I got rid of them both and got myself the P990i mad

Within the first two weeks of acquiring the stupid thing I had to take it in for an upgrade (which meant that I had to be without a phone for an additional two weeks!) because it kept on freezing, shutting down and kinds of issues. Needless to say that the upgrade didn’t do much and some of the processes where even more time consuming than before i.e. startup! My biggest problem is that as much as this phone claims to offer multi-tasking once you actually do that it will either stall or freeze! Don’t even try opening image rich PDF files because by the time it’s done opening one page the ice on you cool-drink has melted! The worst thing of all is the OS, with windows based OS you can easily find third party applications as an alternative to the manufacture’s weaknesses but with this UIQ OS you struggle! And I can go on and on, I’ve decided that as soon as I can I will send this thing to the museum of the world’s worst technological blunders and replace it with an HTC or something but never SE again!

And to actually think that I used to swear by SE, I wouldn’t have considered any other brand because SE was perfect, vibrant and functional especially for the young generation! I’m truly disappointed SE, my advice: STOP MAKING SMARTPHONES and stick with walkman phones because that is your specialty!