Title: Kies woes
Date: 2011-03-17
Lang: en

Ok so now I have this new Android device. After downloading some apps and playing around with it for a few days I am ready for "the real stuff", namely rooting, flashing custom images and all the other hacking fun that's possible with this kind of devices.

The official software that Samsung provides is [Kies](http://www.samsungapps.com/about/onPc.as) which unfortunately only runs on windows. In anticipation of the phone I set up an old Pentium 3 machine with Windows XP to run that software. Kies rather crawls on that machine but hey, it works. 

So I connected the phone, Kies recognized it and offers to update the installed image. This is where the trouble begins: Kies does a backup of all the data on the phone (not that it's much) and starts to flash the new image. It puts the phone in download mode but then fails with a rather generic error message. I let it sit for 30 minutes to make sure I'm not too impatient but that did not help either. I re-tried a couple of times. No success.

I did some googling for the error message and found a support note from Samsung somewhere that a USB 2.0 port is required. My old PC only has USB 1.1 ports. So my next attempt will be to install Windows on a spare drive on my laptop and try again. Stay tuned!