NaviFirm+

A laptop on a workbench showing an abstract multi-column data table beside a disassembled smartphone

NAVIFIRM was the all-purpose tool for retrieving firmware images for Symbian smartphones, for obtaining lists of product codes, and for finding the right product code for a given handset. It fetched all of this directly from the manufacturer's own update servers, so nobody had to wait for someone else to post a data package or a code list to a forum first.

Archive notice. Symbian Toys was an independent hobbyist software project for the Symbian Series 60 platform, which Nokia discontinued in 2013. These pages preserve the project's own documentation as it was published. The software is no longer distributed here, and no support was ever offered for it. Device and platform names appear for identification only; the project was never affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any device manufacturer.

Description

The project's own summary listed four kinds of user, and it is worth reproducing as written because it explains the tool's unusual reach:

End users — find product codes to use with the standard service and update applications.
Journalists — be the first to know when new firmware appears on the update service.
Developers — download ROM images in order to extract files from them.
Care suite, Phoenix and box users — download ROM images to flash.

Additional update servers could be added by editing Main.cs in the source code. The page carried the usual standing notice: the software was provided "as is" with no warranty whatsoever, express or implied, and without any technical support at all.

Attribution

Symbian Toys was careful about this, and so is this archive. The original NAVIFIRM was written by EPICBIZNUS. What this site published was a modified build — NaviFirm+ — carrying additional improvements, each one documented in the change-log rather than quietly folded in. The page said so directly: "The main developer for this software is EPICBIZNUS, I have made the additional improvements which have been documented in the Change-Log."

Change-log

The change-log preserved from the archived page, for the 0.5 build:

New: added caching.
New: advanced filter for results.
New: copy URLs to clipboard — this feature could be used to download files with any external download manager.
Improved: columns can be resized.
Improved: window can be resized.

The clipboard feature is a small thing that says a lot about who the tool was for. Rather than build a download engine, it handed the URL list straight to whatever the user already trusted to move large files over an unreliable connection — which, in 2010, most people did.

Close-up of a USB cable connected to the base of a small mobile phone

Why product codes mattered

A Symbian handset of this era did not carry one universal firmware. Each market, and often each operator within a market, had its own product code, and the firmware image published for one code could differ from another in language packs, preinstalled applications, operator branding and sometimes in the release schedule itself. A user in one country could watch a release land for a neighbouring code weeks before it reached theirs. Knowing the codes, and being able to see which images actually existed on the update servers, was the difference between waiting and understanding what you were waiting for.

That is the gap NaviFirm+ filled. It did not modify anything on the handset and it did not bypass anything: it enumerated what the manufacturer was already publishing, and made the list legible.

Version history

Eighteen NaviFirm+ releases are evidenced in the site's own download records, running from 0.9 through to 3.2: 0.9, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 2.0, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.7, 2.8, 2.9, 3.0 and 3.2. That is the longest release run of anything the project published, and it tracks the years when Symbian was still shipping firmware worth chasing. The complete inventory across all eight programs is on the release archive page.

Related tools

NaviFirm+ obtained firmware; NokiaCooker modified it. The two were routinely used together by the small community that built customised firmware images, and the project's news column tracked both. Source for the Symbian Toys catalogue is now available from the author's GitHub account, published in 2021.