There Goes a Day!

In my continuing saga to use Android only for a month straight I decided to upgrade my Samsung Galaxy S from Android 2.1 to 2.3 as the update is now available. As I mentioned in my last post Samsung Kies, the software used to upgrade your firmware, is not supported on my Mac. The solution of course was to dust off my old T61p ThinkPad and load up the Kies software on it.

At least that was fairly straight forward although nothing after that was. I plugged in my phone after installing Kies and the software could not determine my phones current firmware level. After a reboot of my phone and PC it finally identified I was running Android 2.1.

Going to the update firmware section Kies informed me I would upgrade in two steps, 2.1 -> 2.2 and 2.2 -> 2.3. Fair enough, I thought. So everything was going along swimmingly until a dialog box popped up telling me the upgrade failed and I should unplug my phone reboot and try again. Everything in my nature told me this was the wrong thing to do but I went along with it any way.

Big mistake, my phone was now bricked. I was treated with this image on my phone:

Reading up on this I was able to find out the magic three key combination of volume down, home and power that would put the phone back in download mode. Even after that no amount of prompting would get the phone to reconnect with Kies.

ARG!!!

I don't know why I bothered to try and do it the "right way". Instead I ended up following this instructions which actually worked! Basically it uses Odin to flash the firmware on my phone. After a few minutes of flashing by Odin, and a factory reset, my phone was back to working properly. Because I did a factory reset I needed to re-install all my apps but who cares the phone works again.

My first impression of Android 2.3.3 is that it fixes the issue with the GPS on my phone. I can actually get a location now!