Upgrade phone firmware? No, thanks!

We just heard that Nokia has announced a firmware upgrade for the 8GB version of the N95. And it seems to be rather interesting – among the features it adds are support for flash lite and flash video as well as fixes that make the phone work a lot faster.

Well, two of my acquaintances have the N95 8GB version and have no plans of installing the upgrade!

Their rationale is simple – the process takes too long and is risky. They have to back up all the content on their phones, download the upgrade, wait for the new version to get installed and then transfer their data back to the phone – all of which means not being able to use the phone for upto an hour. What’s worse, all both said that they had ultimately ended up losing some data or features in the process – one of them lost 2-3 games that he had downloaded when he upgraded the firmware of his p1i, while another claimed that upgrading her Treo 600 firmware had seen her lose a number of browser bookmarks! The result: none of them had any intention of doing a firmware upgrade and in fact, even warned me against doing so. When I pointed out the benefits of the upgrade, one them snapped: “I don’t care if I have a slower phone with fewer features. I did not bust Rs 25k on a phone to lose data.”

Perhaps it is time cellphone manufacturers came up with a better method of installing upgrades. Any suggestions?