Nokia rolls out software update for N9, bricks mine and others’

Nokia is rolling out its first update for the N9 and as I wrote about it the other week, it’s a pretty big update for those who received their N9s with the stock 1.0 software.

When I received my N9 from Nokia Indonesia, it already came with version 1.1 (20.2011.40_2_PR_005) which is newer than the one that was shipped with the initial batch of N9s. I saw a couple of units with v. 34 instead of the v. 40_2 that I got. The public update that was rolled out earlier today is designated 40_4 which brings four more new features over the 40_2. I listed the differences in the previous post.

Around 11 am GMT+7, a notice popped up on my N9 letting me know that there was an update for the phone, so I proceeded to back up my phone and was about to run the update when I decided to tweet about it and soon after was told by a friend not to run the update because her N9 had gone kaput after she ran it. Another friend also ran the update and is now holding a bricked N9.

The update came in at 11MB instead of the 218MB that was announced earlier. As it turns out, the larger size had been for the entire OS instead of the update. Having gone through Over-The-Air update smoothly for my iPhone, I placed my faith in Nokia, despite the warnings. Turns out I should have trusted her. Now my N9 is stuck in a boot loop and I won’t be able to use it until Nokia gets it fixed.

The comments in the Nokia Conversations blog swayed my decision to update because there had been very positive feedbacks for the updates but I overlooked the likelihood that they were updating from an older version of the OS than mine.

Now, I have to wait for my contacts at Nokia Indonesia to get back to me so I can have it restored to operational status.

[update]

A full restore from scratch apparently would get the phone working again but I may lose all photos, songs, videos, and apps I’ve stored in it. I’m heading to Nokia’s office to get it fixed.  

I’ve got photos and videos transferred to iPhoto, and some of the songs are from iTunes but I’ve downloaded a few dozen from Nokia Music. The apps and songs may need to be redownloaded. This would be a big meh.

Nokia rolls out software update for N9, bricks mine and others’