Why oh why do you hate me Mr. N96

I have been using the N96 for a couple of weeks now and I am getting more frustrated every day. The firmware release that I am currently stuck with, 11.018, is driving me mad. It seems to crash at least once daily and I have to yank the back off pull the battery to get it back up again. This is not something I would ever expect from a high end Nokia N-series device. Frankly I cannot believe they ever put a software version out this bad.

My previous phone was a N95-3 which I loved in every way. I then moved up to a N95-4 (8GB) which was even better. You would think the next logical step for a media junkie like myself would be the N96 right? Wrong! This smartphone has the potential however its problems out weigh all of the positive things it brings to the table. I send a lot of text messages and sending on this revision of firmware is painful sometimes. I select a contact select create message and wait and wait. Even the things you would think it would excel at such as viewing photos, lags like a low end device. When you are moving through the photos it takes 1 to 2 seconds for the image to properly render. On either N95 this would be a second max with thousands of photos on the phones memory card.

While these things are annoying I could live with them knowing they would be fixed whenever they actually release the firmware update to us NAM N96 users. One thing I cannot live with is the huge problems with 3g and wifi connectivity. At times it takes 3 times or more to get the connection to work to check email or surf the web. Wifi umm yea right, your lucky if you can get it to work at all. I have almost given up trying to use wifi to download my podcast and watch videos.

As most of you know I'm a huge S60 advocate so this is painful to write but paying almost $700.00 for a phone and getting this is a real disappointment. I am going to continue to hold out for a couple more weeks if I can. I want to see if the firmware makes it out to us NAM users. Beyond that I'm giving up. Come on Nokia help me out here please.