C'mon T-Mobile, stop dragging your heels!

I've been waiting for something like the Location Tagger (LT) app from Nokia Beta Labs for my N95 for some while now. This allows photos to be automatically geo-tagged with location information, straight in the EXIF data. Nokia say it will become part of the normal functionality in future, but has been released as a stand-alone beta app for now.

In a search for similar functionality, I'd tried Showzu previously, but that killed the video functionality on the phone for me. I'd tried a couple of other applications that purport to be able to geotag my photos too, but they either plain didn't work for me, or were too fiddly to get results, or (shock horror), I'd have had to pay for them!

So along comes Location Tagger from Nokia to answer all my prayers. Except. This app needs to run in the background, checking on GPS position to add to any photos that are taken. Now, my N95 might be a bit 'special', but I have a particular problem with this. As soon as I open my camera app, all other apps close: Music, Jaiku, Messaging, whatever is running just disappears from the Task Bar never to be seen again. Same with Location Tagger. It's running, I open up the camera screen, the LT icon appears on the camera screen. I take a picture and one of two things happen: either the picture is saved, but without the geotags and the Location Tagger closes, or the screen goes blank, the camera app itself closes and I lose the photo completely.

I had a particularly disappointing weekend, as I'd hoped to get some decent geotagged photos during a drive out to Kent.

Now Nokia would say they have the answer to all this, in the form of the latest firmware for the N95, which allows for On-Demand Paging (ODP). This would allow multiple apps to share the available RAM, thus allowing concurrency and true multi-tasking among the  apps.

For my sins, I have a phone on a T-Mobile contract, and I've written before about how they drag their heels in making available the branded version of the firmware, but this time it's serious! OK, I waited a few weeks for Assisted GPS, but it's been a couple of months now, and still no sign of the ODP firmware upgrade for us T-Mob customers!

I'm rapidly being led to the conclusion that the only option open to me is to invalidate the warranty on the phone, and de-brand it in order to get the upgrade. Not an option I'd take lightly as I still have some 9 months to go on the warranty.

I've been urged by others who have taken this drastic step to do it, it won't hurt, and I'll be forever grateful that I did it. But I have this reputation with computers in general: as soon as I depart from the norm, things break. My greatest fear is that I'll 'brick' the phone during the process, or forget to copy down a vital setting and lose access to Web'n'Walk, or VoiceMail, or SMS or any of a myriad other settings that are hidden in the depths of the phone. If anyone has taken this step with a T-Mob branded phone and has a 'dummies guide' handy then I'd certainly appreciate any pointers, but in the meantime:

C'MON T-MOBILE, STOP DRAGGING YOUR HEELS, AND RELEASE THE FIRMWARE UPGRADE!!!