Living with Android

I just wanted to give a brief update on how things have been going living with Android full time. Back in September I decided not to re-up my three year contract with Rogers on my iPhone 3G and give Android a month to woo me. The experiment was not without it's tribulations as attempting to upgrade my OS from 2.1 to 2.3 using the Samsung Kies software bricked my phone. Luckily, I was able to resolve that problem by flashing my firmware with ODIN.

Honestly, since that time life with Android has been pretty great. That is until my trip to AnDevCon in San Francisco. While on that trip I noticed my phone was extremely hot which was unusual. Once I took it out of my pocket I saw that it was rebooting to which I assumed I was out of battery but that was not the case. The phone was constantly rebooting loading the Samsung welcome screen and then rebooting again. In order to make it stop I needed to pull the battery out of the back.

Initially I wasn't concerned as I figured it either needed a full charge or worse case scenario I could flash the firmware again using ODIN. Sadly, upon return home to Ottawa nothing I tried to fix the phone would work. The phone would flash to Android 2.3.5 but still it was stuck in the rebooting cycle.

I called Bell Canada from whom we purchased the phone. Since the phone died 1 week after it's 1 year warranty Bell wanted $50 to look at the phone and anywhere between $50 to $200 in order to fix the phone. This really didn't make a lot of sense to me as at that point I might as well buy a new phone.

Thanks to a suggestion by my bosses boss I called Samsung Canada. After about 10-15 minutes on the phone with first and second line support Samsung emailed me a UPS shipping label for me to send the phone into them where they would fix it for free. Oh happy day! Finally, a company that still stands behind their product and provides good customer support.

So I got the phone back after about 2 weeks and it is working good. I've already flashed it to the latest Gingerbread release 2.3.5 and I've never been happier with my Android phone.

However, after using my iPhone for almost a month as just a music player and browser I gotta say it is pretty sweet. I'm going to try to hold off a bit longer but I'm pretty sure there will be an iPhone 5 in my future once that magical new device is releases.