Nokia: Phones = Good; Software = Ass

I was trying to help Leslie get her Nokia 6230 to work with her computer so she could convert some MIDI files into ringtones. It just did not want to work properly to her PC, so I thought we'd give it a try on my computer.

Thus began an adventure of pain and suffering for all.

I installed their PC Link software, and the InstallShield never finished. It spawned an additional InstallShield for some additional software, and that InstallShield had hung, rendering the parent one unable to finish. Eventually the parent installer gave up and finished the installation. I conencted the phone via the data cable, and it proceeded to install no fewer than eight, yes, eight drivers for the phone. Many of which were unsigned. I mean, c'mon. Nokia is a big company, there's no reason they shouldn't get their drivers signed by Microsoft, but then again, you'll soon learn why they aren't signed to begin with.

Anyway, after their PC Link software prepares to royally fuck my computer, I find that the InstallShield process that hung was for -- get this -- data cable drivers. Sigh. So, I install that component separately, and finally Nokia's software is able to see the phone.

This software package is a major POS. It has several components for music and sound synching. One which simply doesn't work -- it crashes as soon as it starts. The other one, which did work, would only transfer a couple of songs until it would crap out, requiring me to restart the application.

Here's the most unforgivable piece of the puzzle though. Remember the unsigned drivers? Well, it's kind of curious that it doesn't say what those drivers are when it's installed. I soon figured it out, though.

I went to the file manager thingy, which is basically a way of mapping your phone as a drive to your computer. That in itself is cool, but as it managed to basically render my computer inoperable, I discovered some interesting things. First, the unsigned drivers appear to be filesystem drivers. Secondly, they really are just a shim for an application that acts as a broker to emulate the Nokia filesystem on the computer. Thirdly, that application is immensely unstable, but, since it shims its operations through a driver, it's able to get complete low-level kernel access and basically tell the OS, "fuck you," when it gets an interrupt signal or anything.

It proceeded to peg my CPU at 100%, and render the whole OS so slow, I waited for five minutes after hitting several three-finger salutes, and the task manager never came up. I had to hard reset my computer to get it to wake up.

First thing I did after rebooting, was to uninstall that shit as quickly as possible.

Nokia, Nokia, Nokia. You make such good phones, why can't you develop decent PC applications to use them? I've never seen such POS applications from such a big company, and the hacks and driver shims are completely inexcusable. It's no wonder the drivers aren't signed by Microsoft -- there's no way their signing lab would ever let any of those piece of shit drivers ever get past their tests.

If anybody knows of any alternative Nokia management software packages, perferably *not* made by Nokia, I'd be interested in checking it out.