That does it!

I have just installed Maps 3, freshly released on Nokia’s site and sadly discovered it has so many bugs, that it’s unusable.

I dunno what’s happening inside Nokia’s house, but I have to admit they’ve been very clever in the past months to score consecutive bad records in a row.

I’m telling you because months ago I’ve switched back to Nokia phones after a long time and quite disappointed I’ve realized the N96 has been thrown into the market with an alpha buggy firmware, without a suitable battery (in almost a year time they still didn’t release a decent battery with higher mAh…. what are you waiting for guys?), and the software/firmware technical support is basically non-existent, prove me wrong if you can.

They have scattered multiple support forums on the web where you can barely get support from other skilled users, if you’re lucky… Shall we talk about the “strategy” of delivering 3 suites for some phones? PC Suite, N series and OVI! Each one does something the other doesn’t….. nice salad guys!

Now back to Maps 3. Did I tell you about my happiness when I’ve discovered that Maps 3 beta had deleted my Maps 2 license… no way to get it back for free, no answers from “technical support”.

Then the long awaited release: the “official” Nokia Maps 3.

As I’m using Vista’s DPI scaling set at 144%, I could barely read what was written in the install dialogs (oversized and clipped fonts). Neither I could use the mouse to click on the dialog’s buttons, only the spacebar was working.

Once done, I couldn’t complete the update process just beacuse the Nokia Maps Updater crashed with the following output:


Problem signature: Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: NokiaMapsUpdater.exe
Application Version: 1.0.7.0
Application Timestamp: 4a44e967
Fault Module Name: NokiaMapsUpdater.exe
Fault Module Version: 1.0.7.0
Fault Module Timestamp: 4a44e967
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 000648ce
OS Version: 6.0.6001.2.1.0.256.1
Locale ID: 1040 Additional Information 1: e697
Additional Information 2: 484bfd979ebad31872c979da325327a9
Additional Information 3: 5df3
Additional Information 4: feca807d3f8a08aa8f72ee55e09f95dc


At that point I’ve tried to use the applet on the phone…. I’ve set the 2D/3D view, the map orientation to follow route, bla bla bla and, “how nice!” settings aren’t saved when you exit! Could they be so crazy while testing for months, to reenter the settings every time launching the application? Thousands times?

The best is yet to come!

After a while I’ve received a message from the Nokia Maps 3 on the phone asking me to allow a connection to the Internet because the license on my phone was “incompatible”….. “nice guys, are you giving me back the spoiled license?”

NOPE!!!

Another message was shown, something like “No data found”….. and it all ended in a nice phone crash! I had to pull out the battery from the phone to recover!

What else can we say?