Last night I finally got my cell phone operating system upgraded.
Let me tell you, it was a challenge.
The new update came out last Friday I think. It’s a 100mb download, and some hoop jumping.
I first tried to do the upgrade on Sunday morning. I downloaded the file (tip, click ‘more details’ to make the download link appear), tried to un-install the Samsung USB drivers – I didn’t have them, but I uninstalled some Samsung CDMA modem drivers from my previous phone for good measure. I reboot my computer. I start the installer, and it gives you the steps to take to do the update. Take the battery out of the phone, put it back in, do some funky 3 finger start on the phone to get it into ‘download mode’, plug it into the computer. Now it says to unplug the phone from the computer and repeat the steps in the previous sentence. Okay… Ah! Now it wants me to update. I press Start Update.
It was rather anti-climatic. It didn’t do anything. I wander off, do things for an hour and a half come back to check. Nothing.
The phone says “DO NOT UNPLUG TARGET” in letters that are not warm and friendly. So, I unplug the target (phone) and cross my fingers. Take the battery out, restart the phone. It’s all in good shape. Sweet! I didn’t wreck my phone.
Last night…
I try this again. I reboot the computer. Close all the auto-start applications. Kill services that use the USB ports like the ipod utilities thingy. I start upgrade software, follow the plug it in, unplug it, plug it in – I tossed in a ‘turn yourself around’ for good measure.
This time it did something… for about a minute, than it errored out, saying it can’t connect to the phone. This is after I had seen it issue a ‘format()’ command to the phone.
I tried this about 3 times, and gave up. So I pull the battery, restart the phone, and OH OH.
“Unable to locage .jpg or .png” in red letters across the top of the screen that are most certainly NOT notoriously large and famously friendly letters.
Crud. (fill in your favorite explicative here… repeatedly) I just bricked my 2 month old Samsung Moment doing the Android 2.1 upgrade!
So, in a last ditch effort of heroics and utter despair, I wander my depressed little self to the office to do an hour’s worth of work and try the upgrade on my work computer.
It worked! I managed to save my phone. Work was a bust, but my phone no longer is!
Enough of that little sob story. Well, besides the fact that the update completely wipes the phone clean. You have to reinstall and re-setup everything. I did use some backup utilities which I will talk about in a later blog post.
Android 2.1 feels a little bit snappier on my Samsung Moment. The letters seem to show up on screen just a little bit faster then before. There doesn’t seem to be that slight hesitation in pulling down the Notifications window.
The first thing that is noticeable is the new ‘sleep screen’ for lack of better terms. It has the current time and date in notoriously large and famously friendly letters which looks really sharp. It also has 2 sliders, one to unlock the screen, the other to toggle the volume.
I can turn off the lock on the phone as you now turn on the screen using a swipe, which is nice. The first thing I had noticed when I got the phone is that it liked to pocket-dial. I had to turn on the screen lock just to prevent this.
The camera app is a little bit better. I was always fighting the old one over the flash. It was about 3 seconds to turn the flash on or off. The new version is about a second, plus there is now an ‘auto’ mode, which is nice. I wish you could just tap a button to toggle the flash mode or something.
The only other thing that the update has done for me that I have seen is allowed me to use some of the cooler applications – like Google Goggles.
Two apps do seem to be broken – Google Voice and Listen. I use Google Apps for your Domain, and that seems to be messing with both of these apps while using Android 1.5 it worked fine. I use both of these quite a bit – especially Google Voice, so this is a major bummer for me. I mean, roll-back level, if I had the option to.
So, overall, the upgrade was a wash, and I lost more then I gained in it. Hopefully I can get Google Voice working soon, which will put the upgrade at a mild success in my book.
UPDATE 2010-06-03 Added links to http://shop.sprint.com/en/software_downloads/pda_smartphone/samsung_moment.shtml as people are coming here to find out how to update a Samsung Moment from Android OS 1.5 to 2.1.
When I upgraded my Hero, I had a problem with Google Voice. I followed the advice of someone somewhere else on the web to fix it.
I am a google apps for my domain user, so I have two google accounts that look exactly the same. One, [email protected], is on my domain. The other that looks exactly the same is used to login to google services (like google voice) that aren’t available yet to apps users.
When you set up android, it nicely hooks contacts and email through my apps account (as I want it to). It seems however, that when you go to gvoice it doesn’t find your google services account. The solution is that when it asks you to set up gvoice and it defaults to [email protected] you tell it to ‘add another account’. Then the account you add looks exactly like the account it already has. Somehow it just figures it out right this time.
That is exactly the same setup I am using!
Your recommendation works! Your the best!
… and the reason I stopped by this blog was that I was looking for help for my son. He reports that on his 2.1/moment, every time he goes to the notifications the screen locks up. Any hints/tips? Thanks.
I do not have the same problem.
Just a hunch, does he have an app installed that adds something to the notification bar? Try uninstalling that?