Jean-Marc FERRON's Profile

"I was a pretty loyal Nokia customer," says James Gurney, one consumer who bought the N97 shortly after it hit the market. "At £500 I thought I was paying a bit over the odds, but trusted that the user experience would be good." Instead, he suffered bugs including memory problems, charging issues and difficulties with the screen. Nokia said these would be fixed by a software update, called v11, that reached British users three weeks after the phone went on sale. But it didn't fix everything. A further release, v12, was completed this August. Many British customers, however, have yet to get it: it was only available to those who bought unlocked, unbranded phones for a single day at the end of September before it was pulled. Meanwhile, Nokia is already previewing the next set of updates, v20, which it says will be available this month

The v20 software would definitely be available in Britain at the same time as in other countries, she said, probably in late October

At present, the firmware problem is bad enough that one employee of a mobile retailer, who asked not to be named, said he is finding it difficult to recommend the latest Nokia smartphones. "I've found myself advising customers to wait three to four months from a [high-end] N-Series handset's initial release before purchasing, as we expect all of them to have flaws in the original release."