I bought my Nokia N95 from a Phones4U shop, one with extremely aggressive sales staff who will do you a deal. They matched the best deal I could find on the web, although it did take 90 minutes of my like and weary from the experience I signed a direct debit mandate for the pointless phone insurance they flog – I had said no to this but put the form in front of me with the monthly contract one at the same time. Anyway, I was really pleased with the phone until I discovered that the GPS just didn’t work. I went back to Phone4U and they told me to phone Nokia (this is incorrect advice, but I will come back to this in another post), so I phoned Nokia and they told me to take it to the repair centre at the Carphone Warehouse which I did. I had to pay a £50 deposit for a bog standard phone, and waited three weeks.

I got the phone back they said they had flashed the BIOS and everything was fine, so I tried the GPS and guess what it took an absolute age to get a lock – minutes. I couldn’t face speaking to Nokia or Phones4U, so I thought I would give the service provider a ring to see what they would do. They tried to convince me that this is normal and I had to stand with my arm outstretched at a 45 degree angle – apart from looking like a prize pr*#+ it would also be like offering up my phone to any mugger in the vicinity. Fortunately, they realised that I was about to go postal and agreed to give me a new phone and guess what it didn’t work any better – arrghhhh.

In desperation I turned to Google and found out that if I upgraded my phone to firmware version 20 all would be fixed. I tried this and unfortunately Nokia’s firmware upgrade software told me that I was on the latest version. A bit more Googlefoo and I found out that you can only use version 12 on Orange phones and need to trick the Nokia software into thinking my phone was a generic one. I followed the instructions here and guess what the GPS works perfectly.

Did Nokia, Orange and Phones4u know this? Of course they did…