UK Carriers Stripping the N95 of Features

While I share in the sympathy of many UK residents who've purchased their N95's through their carriers such as Vodafone, Orange and possibly others, I have to admit that I'm not surprised to see this happen.

Usually when I blog about US residents and our gripes about our carriers and what they do to our devices, I usually get a couple of comments about how UK carriers offer more freedom.  According to Nokia's Discussion Forum, the N95's being sold by Vodafone and Orange have been stripped of the Internet Telephone application... so much for freedom.

As unfortunate as it is, I guess now its known what we US residents go through on a regular basis.

Comments

[dario]

Hey Darla. Love your blog! About stripping features, is it not possible to flash the phone (firmware upgrade) to get rid of this?

[whatleydude]

Dario - that's exactly what I was going to say - I did that to my Vodafone UK N73 ages ago and never looked back!
I'll no doubt do exactly the same with the N95 (when I get it tomorrow - woo!)

[Jackig]

We (at Truphone*) have made a short video which shows what's missing from some operator-modified mobile phones, namely the internet telephony files: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yB0OmHtp3uk

If you have an N95 which is still fully in tact, then you may be interested in seeing how you can use wifi on the N95 to make cheap mobile VoIP calls: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMGCYuqqqxs.

*Disclaimer: I work for Truphone.

[swifty]

This is all well and good, but how do you actually 'flash' a phone to restore all the features. I have a nokia N95 8GB on vodafone and it's voip/sip capability is blocked. Naturally i want to unlock it and use it as Nokia intended!! HELP!