Got my Froyo (2.2) for Android

This was something else to setup. Not because of Android, but because of software developed by Samsung called Kies. Kies is a pretty sad piece of code, it takes ages to install, requires .NET framework, takes ages to open and provides features that you'll never use when you plug your phone to your computer. These features are possible from your phone anyhow, that's why you got a smartphone, right?

I got the dreaded "MTP Application" error that could not install. It just kept looping and would not recognize my Galaxy S. Well the problem seems to reside in filenames with extension that contain more than 16 characters after the last period. That's right, as much as it seems ridiculous, it seems to be true! Someone wrote a program to find those Evil files. And here are the instructions I found to make this happen. If that download link does not work, Google "FileSearcherforKiesFix.zip" and you can find it easily. In the end, I still had to factory reset my device (make sure you backup all you data first!!!) by going to Settings -> Privacy -> Factory data reset. After the reset, my phone was recognized instantly and I was able to upgrade.

 I did run into a glitch though. Near the end of the upgrade procedure, the progress bar froze and my phone screen went blue (Blue screen of death!!!). After 20 minutes of panic, I posted on XDA and a kind soul (thanks BlackDino!) provided the following instructions which worked perfectly :

Unplug, kies will say something went wrong would you like to recover the rom.
Click Yes.
Then remove your battery and boot into download mode
(Vol down + home button + Power)
then kies will ask you to plug in your phone.
do so and click next

To be noted that a pink screen of death is the equivalent. After this, the upgrade process restarted and completed successfully.

Funny note, I actually called Samsung Client Care (1-800-726-7864) to see what they would say. No offense to the kind gentlemen that answered, but "waiting 25-30 minutes for the process to finish" and "if it does not work, read up on Kies documentation, just Google it" proves to me how laughable live support is.

So after loading up Froyo on my phone, first thing I noticed is "wow, this thing is fast!". Downloading and installing apps is probably 5 times faster than before. That's pretty impressive. Next, I fired up the browser and sure enough, I had embedded youtube flash videos in the webpages!! That made me smile!

I also quickly installed Chrome to Phone to replace LinkPush. I really like LinkPush (as seen in a previous post) but when Google release Chrome to Phone for Froyo, well, I just could not resist going with the Google product.

Other enhancements include longer battery life (still testing), auto-dimming of the screen brightness and moving apps to the SD card.

Lets see what else I can find that blows me away!

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