Copyright © 2009 Bojan Smojver, Rexursive.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the licence is here.

Introduction

This story starts with my old Nokia N73, which was getting a bit long in the tooth. It was mostly a good phone, I could rely on. The only problem that I had with it was the fact that the time zone database has not been updated, even with the latest firmware. So, every time we had a time change in Sydney, my Nokia N73 would be off by one hour when synced to network time, for about a month. I asked Nokia to fix this numerous times, both using their support web form and over the phone. Suffice to say, nothing has ever been done about this, for over two years. But I digress...

Anyhow, it was time to change. I wanted a QWERTY phone this time and it seemed that Nokia E72 offered the best cross section of features I was after. So, I got one. It is an E72-2 model, which supports 850/1900/2100 MHz 3G WCDMA range (don't believe the spec on Nokia Australia site - it is confusing). This was the last chance I was willing to give Nokia, before giving up on the brand.

The fun begins... again

I got the phone and I was immediately impressed. The build quality was absolutely superb. The phone felt great in the hand, the screen was precise and bright, the keyboard easy to use, voice call quality excellent etc. And to top it all off, the phone was really fast. It was time to set it up.

After restoring my backup from Nokia N73 using the Nokia PC Suite, I went to set up my e-mail. And, of course, immediately hit bugs and missing functionality. Not really surprising, given this is the first spin of the firmware - things like this always happen with Nokia (and I guess other) phones.

The first thing I noticed was that when IMAP mail is configured, the phone cannot display all folders found on the server (which should, of course, be the default). Instead, it has some predefined folders in the list, some of which don't even exist on the IMAP servers I use. Attempts to subscribe to many folders resulted in the phone hanging for a long time. And, occasionally, the mailbox setup can get corrupted by subscribing to very many folders, not to mention that the client cannot actually use them properly (keeps connecting and disconnecting, and eventually gives up). In my case, two different mailboxes that I've set up got renamed to the same name. Very handy. Not.

Apart from that, there is no selection for sent mail folder. Every IMAP client I've seen has this, but not this one. It would be nice to see selection of drafts folder as well, but it's not so important.

IMAP IDLE support is also dubious. One would expect that there would be a setting where if the server closes the connection, the phone opens it again and executes IDLE to wait for new mail. Not so. One can pick the poll period for IMAP mail, which does execute IDLE, but if the connection gets closed by the server, the client will not attempt to open it and IDLE again. This is not real push e-mail. In practice, there could be many minutes before the mail ready on the IMAP server is picked up by the phone.

Strangely enough, e-mail application doesn't start automatically on reboot, even when polling is configured. This means that if you reboot the phone, you need to open e-mail once to get it to poll for e-mail again. Doesn't make any sense to me.

I also encountered some problems with the web browser. Nothing major and I'm sure things can get fixed up on that front easily.

Even more fun

So, I called Nokia support. Not surprisingly, I spoke to someone that had absolutely no idea about what IMAP was, how IDLE was supposed to work or anything like that. I asked them to put all my complaints down and pass them on to someone that does know what it all means.

And just to be sure, the next day, I submitted all of the bugs through the web form to Nokia again, so that their developers see this. Of course, this went to another Nokia representative that replied to me with absolute garbage. This person claimed, for instance, that Nokia E72 cannot connect to IMAP servers directly, but rather must use Nokia e-mail servers. I wonder how Nokia managed to connect to my own IMAP server, which is behind a firewall, making it inaccessible from the Internet. What utter nonsense. Idiotic stuff like that really ticks me off. Especially when I made sure I don't use Nokia e-mail servers (I don't even have an account there).

Other nonsense advice included checking my security settings in relation to browser bugs I reported, which were Javascript/CSS/rendering errors and had nothing to do with SSL/TLS or security at all.

So, I called them again and asked to speak to a manager. He promised to notify second level support for me. I'm going to be paying attention to what happens with all this (which is most likely nothing) and report here. Oh, and by the way, that manager also promised that someone from second level support will call me within the same day. That didn't happen, but I did eventually get a call from second level support, a week or so later. The issue is being escalated, so that's good news.

A word of advice to Nokia: open your bug database up to your customers. Today. Yesterday, in fact. Hiding things doesn't make them better.

Other details

VOIP calling with Nodephone worked for me, after reading this very useful page: http://www.seancull.co.uk/public/seancull.nsf/dx/setting-up-voip-sip-on-a-nokia-e72.htm. Out of the box settings are not sufficient to get things going though, you need software mentioned at the above page.

Conclusion

In spite of all the problems with support, Nokia E72 is a great smartphone. And, if Nokia (finally) start listening to their customers, it will get better with new releases of the firmware. Let's hope so.