Monday, June 20, 2011

Firmware Update on GoogleIO Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1"

I went to GoogleIO and they gave me a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1"
It's a pretty nice piece of hardware.
Too bad about some of the software.
I have an Android phone to compare to, and in some ways it is better than the tablet. The phone browser has a better bookmark manager.
Today I discovered the lameness of Samsung's firmware update procedure.
1. Go to Settings: About Tablet: Software Update
2. Manually click the button for it to check for updates
3. Make an account with samsung (okay, sure have my email and password I don't care about)
4. click through a few other things to make it actually download the update
5. click through a couple more things to actually do the update while it warns you that you will not be able to make phone calls (not a phone, wifi only) and that the 'phone' will reboot.
6. and here's the part that failed for me twice: the tablet should not be plugged into USB. It will simply fail to try to apply the firmware update with USB plugged into my computer (maybe logicless power would work). So, with 80% charge I called it good enough and ran the update unplugged. It took a couple minutes for the very slow progress bar to pass the firmware update. Actually I wrote this whole blog post while waiting for it to do that. Hmpf.