Nokia N95 Introduction - July 2010 +

Nokia make the best phone hardware but also have the worst OS software and menus so in 2010, everyone is moving away from Symbian Series 60. Nokia were moving to Meego, but now Microsoft Windows Mobile 7 and users are moving to Android and Apple. This support information below is for the penultimate generation of Symbian.

I own a N95 8GB released in 2007 (which I bought second-hand very cheaply years ago) which has excellent camera hardware (5 Mpixel) and movie-making (DVD sized MPEG) that Apple and Microsoft did not match in June 2010. It has a normal USB port and can act as a USB drive but originally could not sync with Mac OS X or Linux until now. The Nokia 95 synchronization software is awful even on Microsoft Windows - the only place it actually runs. The problem is that Nokias desktop software requires a Microsoft software library to be installed and both that and the Nokia-supplied desktop software keep changing and both installations require administrator access and using Microsoft software from an account that has administrator access is almost guaranteed to get you a virus or other malware even if you do get through all the installations and reboots before you do the actual sync. Just the first unpatched Nokia Ovi Suite download is a 300 MB download which is half the size of the entire GNU/Linux Ubunutu operating system with all its standard applications - madness ! The N95 8GB does not even support the old AT commands that my Sony Ericssson phones still do so the N95 8GB is an excellent phone killed by bad or closed software. If Symbian really is open source now, maybe someone could set up a trusted website that allows users with Linux to install a new Phone OS or applications to get their data out and free? One of the peculiar pains of the N95 is that you can fill your address book with peoples birthdays, but none will ever show up in the calendar ! My Apple Newton could do that sort of thing in 1995.

Nokia N95 with Linux

The N95 shares data from the internal disk easily via USB (USB-Storage profile) but you may want to archive off your SMS text messages, calendar entries and contacts too. That used to be almost impossible. Some useful links that were buried on the Internet and are displayed below. Normally good Google seemed to find too many old links. The big story is the June 2010 release of SyncEvolution V1.0 which Intel has supported and V1.01 on 17th July 2010 which works with Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).

N95 Sync with Linux Ubuntu 10.04

Basically, you add the SyncEvolution repository to your apt (synaptic) software sources (System->Administration->Software Sources or Synaptic Package Manager) and then refresh/reload your list of available software, install SyncEvolution version 1.01, and then start up bluetooth and sync-gui and finally add a new sync service to your N95. Now you can sync. That part is easier and faster than you might expect. I do not use Evolution for my email because it does not allow the deletion of email attachements (which Mozilla Thunderbird does allow) but one can export other stuff out of Evolution to whichever application or file that you want it to really be. The separate SMS dump application listed below writes a separate text file for each SMS in your Inbox and ignores the SMS that you wrote yourself.

One complex older suggestion was the following :



Back to Top
Back to Personal Home Page