I found out that Nokia had put out another firmware update, 210.21.006. As per usual, installing it required me to use NSS to switch product codes.
The update is a stability patch. It’s said it finally does something about the camera’s purple haze, although it seems to me this is merely a fix to the white balancing. It’s still very noisy, but each improvement is appreciated.
The simple bugs are left alone: Contacts still uses a custom pure white background instead of the theme and Messages still shows names backwards. What I’m hoping they did fix is internal bugs, that have previously caused graphics corruption, program crashes and even phone reboots. Since I had no known way to trigger those bugs, I can’t confirm it.
The rumour mill also says hacking the phone to remove the signature requirements for installing programs has become harder. Personally I’ve used the tedious symbian open signed online process, so it makes no difference as yet.
This time around I chose to restore my settings from the PC Suite backup. This led to some confusion as apps largely, but not completely, disappeared from the menus. Reinstalling them fixed most of it, though the Maps 3 beta required an extra procedure – manually erasing the maps, running Maps 2, then reinstalling Maps 3 with the updater. Had they provided a SIS for Maps 3 it would have been a simple reinstall.
In conclusion, I would recommend this update; it should contain bug fixes that matter, even if they’re not the visible ones.