Recently Nokia updated the N900 to the so-called “42-11″ firmware. As before, the kernel version is 2.6.28 compiled for OMAP (ARMEL). It seems that Nokia has done some great improvements in power saving to this kernel. There were also a few software upgrades included in this new firmware, however on my review unit there are still some things that hopefully will be working soon on the units that are shipping.

The battery life has been extended quite a bit, and to my surprise the N900 battery seems to be outlasting my N810 (with a 1500mAh battery versus the N900′s 1350mAh). With this upgrade to battery life, Nokia has one more thing to show off to it’s competitors.

There have also been a few improvements to various software applications, most notably Media Player. Now when browsing your albums, you’re greeted with the album art instead of just the album name.

One of the things I’ve been hoping to see before I have to turn in my review unit, is USB-OTG host mode. However the software that was written to make this possible, has not yet been ported (successfully) to the N900. One of the things that makes the Maemo platform (and Linux in general) so successful is that most of the software written for it is open source. That allows developers to look at and use the programming code from similar programs. Doing so means that development work happens relatively quickly since programmers don’t have to start from scratch each time they create a new application. Once the N900 is available to the mass market, I expect there to be an explosion of applications.

AAS recently stumbled upon a screenshot which clearly shows that the current Nokia imaging flagship ie the N86 is going to include Face Detection.
 
 
 
Screenshots show that the N86 is about to receive some features which have long been touted by competing manufacturers like Samsung.

As can be seen above, face detection which will be included in the next FW update will allow the camera to intelligently focus on all the people in a frame and also track their faces in real time.

Along with face detection , the N86 is about to receive significant improvements in the photo quality department with much improved colors and reduced compression artifacts.

What we would really like added to the firmware would be massive bug fixes !

In what has been an amazing run for the Nokia Software Update team, they have done it once again with the N78. The N78 just received the firmware update v.30.014, so all you N78 users do a backup first, just to be on the safe and load up Nokia Software Updater or Ovi Suite 2.0 and update your beloved smartphone

So go for it you know that these firmware updates usually improve tons of things in our smartphones especially the s60 browser.

Fire up your Nokia Software Updater and update your little devilish good looking Nokia 5800 to latest firmware v21.0.025. Make sure your unit has a nice charge to avoid update interruption.