Nokia's FOTA is flawed

As smartphones become more and more complex, the need to update the firmware (FW) in the device becomes more and more important. Equally important, is the ability to do it easily and in a cost effective manner. I remember the days when an update required a stop to a service center, or shipping your device off to one. Slow and costly for all parties involved.
Next came updates via the PC. This helped things along, but still left a huge problem. Not everyone HAS a PC. Now if you are reading this in the USA, that might seem strange. But if you have aspirations on the huge, under-penetrated BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) market, you have to realize that not only are PCs rare, but the smartphone companies are want to sell the phones as a REPLACEMENT for PCs. So you cannot have an update strategy that relies on them. Apple, take note.

Because of all this, NOKIA has developed a FOTA (FW Over The Air) strategy for their smartphones. The updates to the FW can be 'pushed' over the data network to the devices, and upon a restart the device is running on the new FW. It's reliable technology and works well.

So where is Nokia miss-step? Well, they combined it with another seemingly good idea called User Data Preservation (UDP). UDP allows the phone to retain all of the user's data and settings when doing an update. I can tell you from experience, having to reload all your contacts, apps and settings into a phone after a update can take hours. So fundamentally, it's a good idea.

The problem is that Nokia's implementation is flawed. It does not account for damage to the file system that happens due to a programming error. And it is happening to users now.

Normally, a FW update to the phone would refresh the entire file system. FOTA+UDP does not. If a buggy program has a memory leak that consumed all of the free memory in the C: file system, a FW update or even a so-called factory reset will not cure the problem, and the phone will have to be sent in for repair.

This is NOT a theoretical discussion. The 'Mail for Exchange' client for the new Nokia E75 smartphone has a bug that can eat up all of the free memory on the phone over the course of a few days. Once this has used up all free memory, apps will refuse to load or run. Normally a factory reset, or a FW update would fix this, but because the current process does not want to disturb the file system, it does not. The E75 users that this has happened to (including myself) must sent the phones back to Nokia to have them 'fixed'.

Its not a easy problem to solve. The notion of FOTA+UDP is great idea, but it in the current implementation relies on not touching the file system. Perhaps the solution would be an option to do the FOTA with a file system refresh. What ever the longer term solution, it will not help my E75, which is a box on the way to Finland.