I love my Nokia N79, as you probably know. I firmly believe that it is the best overall Nseries device available on the market today, for NAM (the N86 8MP NAM will hopefully replace it). Unfortunately, it has a rather limited internal storage. Normally, this isn’t a big deal – by installing all of my apps to my memory card, I can overcome this with little issue. However, the other day, I stupidly decided to download and install the free QuickOffice update on my N79 – despite the fact that I never really use Office documents, I just thought it might be handy to have one day.
As most of you also discovered, QuickOffice, despite being a solid product, has a really stupid installation process, whereby it can only be installed to your internal memory. Also, apparently, it doesn’t actually replace the existing version, but rather installs the new version *over* whatever existing version you may have. This left me with ~4MB of internal storage on my N79, which apparently isn’t enough, and I have been constantly plagued with low internal memory errors.
I also have 12-13 N-Gage games installed and licensed to this phone, and I play them quite often. Each game is in a various state of play, where I have progressed and earned various status by playing through the levels. Now, I need to hard reset my phone to get rid of the QuickOffice update that has consumed all of my precious storage. Normally, as I discovered previously, I could simply use the phone’s built-in backup facility to back up my phone’s internal storage to my memory card, hard reset the phone, and then restore the backup and have everything intact. Unfortunately, doing it this way would also, obviously, restore the QuickOffice update that I’m trying to get rid of, so I can’t do that.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be any easy way to backup your N-Gage files to your phone’s memory card, even if you have them all installed there. There are, actually, two options, I discovered, but unfortunately neither would work for me.
The first option is well documented, and suggests that you use X-Plore to access the C:/private folder in order to backup the files found there. Unfortunately, I’m unable to get X-Plore (using the latest version) to access this folder, which makes this walkthrough completely useless.
The second option is a python application, called MyNgageBackup, which requires that your phone be hacked. However, reading through various forum threads about this application, it seems to be hit-or-miss.
So basically, I just went ahead and hard reset my N79, losing all of my N-Gage gaming progress in the process. To be completely honest, it’s doubtful that I will go through the hassle of reinstalling all my N-Gage games again. I have the codes handy, but it’s just such a royal pain in the butt to get things set back up, and it shouldn’t be.
I’m not the only one with this problem, either. It’s been mentioned on the N-Gage Feedback Forum, and even accepted. There are no dates on the responses, but the N-Gage team’s only response is, ‘We are actively working on a solution and this will be rolled out in the near future.‘
It’s hard to believe that Nokia didn’t foresee this happening, and include a backup feature in the N-Gage application. I mean, seriously, I’m just stunned. I really like the N-Gage games, and when I get my N86 8MP, I may install them there, if I can transfer the license codes. Rather than coding a quite small utility (that can apparently be written in Python easily, much less created and signed by Nokia themselves), they’ve decided instead to lose an N-Gage gamer altogether. Brilliant.
Also, for the Nokians I know who will argue that most users don’t hard reset their phones, that doesn’t hold water, because there are a number of N-Gage compatible phones, like the uber-popular N95’s and N82’s that don’t have UDP, so users will have to suffer through this process any time they get a firmware update.
With Nokia really desperately wanting to be considered a media company, they really make some bonehead decisions around letting us manage the media that we purchase from them sometimes. Like the Ovi Store.
