Kies woes

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 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!