To be fair to Nokia (as a long term Nokia/Symbian user who only recently migrated to the Android and the Desire) I've always found them to be pretty good at putting out firmware updates, both incremental fixes and bigger functionality improving ones. Of late they've definitely had problems with releasing initially unready, buggy firmware, but have pretty reliably issued updates trying to rectify things. They've even issued updates to the N95 (a phone that's now quite a few years old, running 2 generations of OS behind) in the last 6 months. I've typically had at least 2-3 updates available for each of the Nokia phones I've had in the past 7-8 years.
Nokia are good with updates, sometimes introducing new apps and things like that (and they did introduce UI improvements on the S60v5 stuff) but I am not sure that - bar the Internet Tablets - they've ever actually upgraded the OS. If it was Symbian 9.x, have they ever actually updated this? It's easy to get confused with the OS and the UI, which could almost be likened to something like HTC Sense.
Nokia is no different to the other companies that now sit back and rely on the OTA updating feature, so they can issue a buggy phone and then allow updates to fix it over time. In some cases, major bugs aren't ironed out for 6-12 months! How ridiculous is that? People have changed phone by the time the phone works as advertised.
It's an even bigger problem for apps now. I am updating some apps (and not beta ones) on a weekly basis. Can anyone remember a time when something would be made as stable as possible before being released? Maybe they were all in fact bugged and simply never fixed, but I am not so sure it was ever as bad as it can be now. Still, blame Google for getting people to accept the use of alpha and beta software/services!




