Warning: Post Contains Gratuitous Blasphemy. Intensely Religious Users, or Daily Mail Readers, Look Away. I have never, ever seen software this bad. Not even real player. I'll say that again for emphasis: not even goddamned real player. Anyone else tried using the Nokia OVI Suite? For the uninitiated, it's a tool to synch your phone's messages, photos, games, etc. with your computer. The difference between this and any third party import app is that this has a login, a user network, and sharing accessibility - so if all your friends and family had a Nokia, had this app, and didn't know about facebook, MSN, Twitter, myspace, Skype or Digg, and felt the need to share their personal messages and contact details over an insecure proprietary network, you might find it very useful. It's Rockstar Social Club but for Nokia device owners, basically - and twice as irrelevant. Funfact: it automatically picks your User Pictures folder in Windows to be the default synch folder. It then tries, unless you tell it otherwise during installation, to synch the contents of that folder with your phone if there's room - in my case, there most definitely ISN'T, and this meant the display was hopelessly bogged down in lag as it tried to thumbnail the 1300-odd images it had queued for transfer. I promptly deleted them all from the app, hoping it wouldn't get overzealous and delete them from my computer as well. Upon returning to "All (0)" it then showed a loading bar. "Loading?" I thought to myself. "Loading what?" Several thousand images, it turns out, that it had requisitioned from my other folders. Unfortunately I can't tell what they are, where it's thrown a tentacle on my computer this time, or select and remove them, because every time I move the cursor over the preview window to click one, or try to scroll, it reverts to the loading icon, then goes back, then schizo's out to the loading icon again, ad infinitum. What's more, it didn't delete the main ones - just shoved them into its own personal recycling bin, "Deleted Photos". The point, given that it doesn't actually modify any files when you delete them anyway? No idea. Attempting to go on Deleted Photos resulted in the same thing, going from this: To this: 11,595 images? Jesus Christ on a bike, Nokia, I didn't ask you to archive my life for me! (To its credit, it did pick some very good pictures for that screenshot - motorbikes, spiders and Cracky-chan. Everyone loves Cracky-chan. Even cold, calculating mobile phone corporations.) That's why neither view could ever load. It was digging through my user folder for more and more and more photos to add, thumbnailing them in the process. It's been in the loading icon loop for about 10 (ret update: 40) minutes now and I still can't browse or select anything through it. Even when I've opened one, it constantly cuts to the loading icon whilst viewing the image. What exactly is it loading? I attempted to delete the Deleted Photos (Nokia, The Joker called, he wants his logic back) and it prompted me to choose whether to actually delete them or just remove them from the app. Naturally, I chose "no, DON'T delete my 11,000 photos IRL, kthx" and set it going: Holy hell, what? At time of typing this has been 'progressing' for about 25 (ret update: 45) minutes, even though it's NOT DOING ANYTHING! It's not physically deleting anything! Honestly, I checked, it's not! So what is it doing? I don't know and I don't care. If this thing can import my SMS, thereby freeing up some room on the woefully small fixed memory on my phone, all's good. Unfortunately, it can't: it doesn't understand multi-part messages (i.e. anything over 240 characters) and conflates them all into a huge jumble of all the multi-part messages you ever received from a contact. Wow. Given that this is Nokia's hardware, firmware and software, that's pretty ****ing inexcusable. I can't show you precisely, because...well, because I don't want to post my text messages on the net. But I can show you by scale comparison. This is what normal messages look like in the previewer: This is what one of the multi-part splurges looks like: It's about twelve messages in one, chopped up and interspersed into an illegible brick of text. There's no conceivable reason for this - the messages are perfectly joined, separated and timestamped on the phone. So. Worst piece of software ever made? It gets my vote. Jesus Christ, Nokia, what would happen if you and Sony had to collaborate?
Woah wall of text, I'm too lazy to read out why Nokia sucks this specific time, but from my earlier experience they indeed just can't do things right. I'm waiting and expecting the whole manufacturer to somewhat fail on the coming years, they just haven't kept up with the competition, and as a result their N-series really blows, phones are mechanically rubbish, using Symbian is probs the most horrifying example of beating a dead horse of the century. So yeah, I'm not surprised if the OVI blows.
Just for a little contrast to what you wrote (which i can't disagree with)... Nokia Music app, as shipped with the N97, is extremely good. If it's not better than iTunes for all common music playing / organising / sync tasks, its at least as good as. Three of the biggest factors are: 1) It's feature complete, it has all the features you need and very few of the ones you don't 2) It's fast, certainly faster than iTunes by a country mile 3) It's lightweight, in a world of bloated nonsense this was refreshing Nokia Music is the first crapware that comes with a product, that i have actually liked.
I've not had great experiences with it either. I use nokia pc suite, it does what I need it to, but as I kept being nagged to update to ovi suite I gave it a go. Bad Idea! Upon connecting both my private mobile and my works phone to it, it syncs them up, next thing I know it's synced every thing to both phones, all my messages, contacts pics, music etc onto both phones which is the whole reason i've got 2. So I start removing my private contacts from my works phone only to find i's also deleting them from my private phone. It made a complete mess of every thing and in the end I ended up wiping both phones and starting again. All I can say is i'm glad I back them up regularly. now back using pc suite and no plans to change!
Interesting read. I used the old Nokia PC Suite (rather than Ovi Suite or Nokia N Series Suite, which is about 100x worse than ordinary PC Suite, yet supposedly designed for their higher-end phones) for my Nokia N82, and although it lagged mass-deleting messages on the phone, it at least copied them across to the PC pretty well, in an organised and fairly sensible manner. I have every text message I sent in two years backed up on my PC If you can't get hold of it through Nokia any more (although I think you can here), PM me and I'll stick the installer up somewhere. Oh, and thank you for making an intelligible and well-written rant, unlike so many others.
Hey, no powerword:realname! If anyone discovered my identity the game would surely be afoot. Update for the curious: not-really-deleting the already-not-really-deleted files took 65 minutes in the end. 1.39Gb of data that didn't need to be modified. Just incredible.
...snip PMSL! Up until i read that, i thought all the bundled motherboard crapware was a contender. Crap software, but great read! lol
