Ah, the mythical PR 1.2. N900 owners have been waiting for the official release of this software update for so long that some of us had given up any hope that it would actually see the light of day but last week, Nokia released the update which cleaned up a few things and was, overall, supposed to make my N900 that much better.

Having spent 2 hours on Friday night installing the new update, the update itself only takes about 20 minutes but I had to do a back-up first – just in case, I must admit I wish I had waited. The new update does include a few new features and widgets that are pretty cool (including an email widget which I was excited to check out) but the drawbacks are so many I’m pining for a return to the previous version of the software.

Here’s what I’ve noticed in the two days since I’ve installed PR1.2:

• Battery life is even worse than before. Admittedly I installed a few widgets that live-update and likely eat a lot of battery. I turned them all off yesterday after my battery drained in 4 hours on Saturday and though it’s better, the battery performance is still worse than it was before. Good thing I have a spare I’m now carrying around for emergencies.
• The Application Manager is gone to shit. It takes forever to load and I’m having issues uninstalling and installing new software. The uninstall feature doesn’t seem to be working at all (it won’t load any of the programs I have installed instead saying “no programs installed”) and the install feature is hit and miss sometimes loading but mostly just freezing while trying to load the download menu (I’m having Windows Vista flashbacks), forcing me to close program. Also a bummer: the search for applications feature has also disappeared, a disappointment since I use that all the time.
• The scrolling speed does seem to be improved but the applications seem to be taking longer to load.
• New night mode video feature is cool but I haven’t had too much of a chance to use it. Looking forward to the opportunity soon.
• New layout of onscreen keyboard is sweet. 
• Media player is not working well. Actually, it’s being a pain in the ass. I transfer my music onto my phone in mass media storage mode which loads my N900 has a hard drive and allows me to dump my music directly into the Sounds folder. When I open the media player, it adds the new songs to the media library. That’s not happening right now. I added 100+ new songs last night which still aren’t appearing in the media library. They play when I force them to (going through the file manager and finding the song) but they’re not loading in. If that’s not bad enough, sometimes when I start the application and try to browse through the artist list, the list comes up empty. It’s frustrating as heck, especially since I’m constantly listening to music.

As it stands, the update has so far been more trouble than it’s really worth. I’m going to do a little digging to see if I can solve some of these issues but if I’m still having trouble by the weekend, be assured that I will be looking for a how to on rolling back to the previous version.

UPDATE: After a bit of online poking around, discovered that folks were having issues with certain themes and PR1.2. I reverted back to one of the pre-installed Nokia themes and voila - seems that most of my complaints are mute (except that the application installer is still slow as hell).