My wife and I both have Samsung Galaxy S IIs. Hers is the Captivate Glide model that has the slide out QWERTY keyboard. My model is the Skyrocket LTE edition. I got a text about a week ago that an upgrade was available for my phone. Her phone got multiple text messages over time because she never wanted her phone upgraded. I finally convinced her to upgrade from Gingerbread.
One thing I hate about Samsung phones is the need for Samsung Kies to upgrade the phones. I can't stand the software. Part of it is because I don't normally run Windows and part of it is that Kies seems to want to install a bunch of crapware. It installs drivers and other things for multimedia. This is a shame, because the software can pre-download firmware for your phone.
Because I don't want to keep Kies installed, I actually install it into my Windows VM. I make sure to take a Qemu disk snapshot prior to installing the software. After I finish upgrading my phones, I revert the disk to the prior snapshot.
First, I tried upgrading my phone. I had some USB connectivity issues, but this has happened before. I almost never reboot my phone, so I know I just have to reboot the phone. After rebooting, I was able to connect. The first attempt at upgrading got stuck in the "Preparing firmware upgrade components" phase. I unplugged the cable, but the upgrade window didn't go away. I had to open up Task Manager and started killing Kies processes. I tried again and the phone upgraded. Now I'm using 4.1.2.
Next, I tried upgrading my wife's phone. It also had some USB connectivity issues that were solved by rebooting. She also never reboots her phone. During the first attempt, it got stuck for 30 minutes in the "Downloading firmware updates to phone" phase. When I realized that Android was still running (it was not in Odin mode), I unplugged the phone and tried again. This time it took 5 minutes to download all 100%. After a few more minutes, the phone rebooted and she was running 4.0.4. I shut down the VM, reverted to the last snapshot, and rebooted. Windows came up without a trace of Kies.
Overall, I love Samsung phones, but they still leave a lot to be desired: especially when it comes to upgrades. The whole process ended up taking about 2 hours to upgrade both phones. The Kies software seems bloated. The phone connectivity was spotty. I would still buy another Galaxy S phone in the future.
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