Then why in the world was this release a complete piece of crap? Please answer that. IF they were doing like you claim, this release should not have broken anything that worked. This release should have been an improvment all around.

But it wasn't. This release should NEVER have seen the light of day. The facts support my argument, your's is based on wishful thinking. Yes it would be nice if Nokia had made this release better than the last one. But they didn't.

That action speaks volumns.

Well the European image is on their main server, the one that you get when you go to nokia.com. Which is where I usually go when looking for stuff for thier products. I didn't see any disclaimers or warnings stating 'dont use this if you're not in Europe'. And while I can see the phone thing being regional (though it shouldn't be in today's world with all the traveling everybody does), there isn't much of an excuse for the time issue.

As a QA manager, I compare this to all the other projects I've had to deal with over the years and the pattern is pretty apparent. Noika's response to my email to them about this was pretty much par for the course too. Sadly no one really cares about Quality software anymore, point to any product out there in the consumer market and they spent more money on it after it goes out the door in bug fixes than they did developing it.

The crap I'm seeing at my present job (A major corp you've all heard of, but I can't talk about it legally) has convinced me to quit the field for good this summer. Consumers don't mind buying crap so there is no reason for anyone to make a quality product anymore. Just look at all the excuses being made for this release. Yeah I hope the North America release is better, I really do.

But I shouldn't have to 'hope', I should be able to 'know'. Get my point?

Well a european user, with European N770, I have had no problems with this release. It installed first time, booted fine with no problems. It runs faster than the previous version, doesn;t crash as much as the previous version.

If you go to www.nokia.com then you start at a flash page where the very first question is "Choose your region". Following the prompts will take you to the nokiausa.com site and thats still got the old image on it.

I think Banner is really Mike Cane in disguise :-)

Maybe I'm off base, I am sometimes, but we're looking at this from an American running Euro software stand point. Yes things that we want to work and worked in the past no longer work. But what about the people in Europe? Other than time zone, what is broken for them? Remember they don't use the same phone systems (land line or cell) that we do.

Forgive my ignorance but whois Mike Cane?

Good grief - how quickly things change, and how quickly one can be forgotten!

(PS - I know this doesn't answer your question ;-))

OT:

Cane - just some guy who would hype a product months before it is released, then rant incessantly about it once he had one (usually because it didn't do something that only he wanted it to do, or because he didn't understand how to make it do what he wanted it to do - he isn't the sharpest tool in the techno toolbox). Mike rapdily moves on to hyping the next must-have gadget once he has lost interest in the current one, he's something of a gadget gadfly, someone who is not in this for the "long haul" and loses interest very rapidly. He likes the sound of his own voice - he has a blog in these parts which runs to 40+ pages but quite a few of us stopped reading it a long time before he disappeared to origami.com (or whatever new-gadget-site-with-a-forum took his fancy) - once he has lost interest in the current gadget he becomes very negative and very vocal... "constructive criticism" is not a term he is familiar with (if you're so inclined, search for some of his later rants against Nokia and the 770).

He's got something of a (bad) reputation on the gadget-related internet fora, particularly Palm where he appears to be universally derided. He was beginning to get the same reputation here, just as well he jumped ship.

Banner's rants are reminiscent of Cane... largely unfounded and serving no purpose. If I'd downloaded the US firmware to my Euro 770 I would only have myself to blame if it began having problems with Euro cell phones!

The clock problem is the only issue I've encountered on my 770 so far, everything else is working great, better in fact. Yes, it's a bad mistake for Nokia to have released this new firmware with the clock issue and should already have issued a refresh correcting the problem but hey... maybe Banner should contact Ari and see if he has any vacancies?

I don't normally follow the forums, especially gadet forums. The fact that I've been here a month and have over 100 posts is surprising and very scary. I hope some of those posts were at least helpful, I'd hate to think I was just a cheerleader making noise to hide the signal.

I don't remember this being a euro only release when it first came out, maybe I wan't paying attention. However now that we know, people having problems in the US should probably move back a revision and wait.

Thanks for taking time and enlightening me.