Eclair to Froyo - Mission Accomplished!

With the craze to get hold of a new mobile and jump on to the Android band wagon, I got myself a Samsung Galaxy S I9000 few months ago. I bought this from Abu Dhabi on my way back from a US tour and since then I've been pretty much in love with the phone. The mobile came with the Android 'Eclair'  version of course with many awesome stuff running on top of it.


However, once I got word of the Android 'Froyo' upgrade being available for the Galaxy S, I was impatient to get hold of it, mainly due to the tempting reviews of Froyo being pretty faster compared to Eclair and also the new feature set it provided.


I have a buddy (Sandu) who also got down a Galaxy S from UK, and one fine weekend, he did the Froyo upgrade like a breeze. Now that the guinea pig was through, I wanted to do this too (No disrespect bro! :) ).


But, when I tried to get on with it, I came across all sorts of obstacles, probably due to the Middle Eastern version of the device (I could be wrong here). Samsung Kies is the application that is 'supposed to' connect my mobile to the PC. But, despite how many Kies distributions I tried, I could never get my device connected to the machine. Perpetually the software was trying to recognize a device. Also, I heard from Sandu that the Android version, build number etc were different on his mobile. With a heavy heart of having to stick with Eclair for longer, I started my research on reasons for this and possible solutions.


Thanks to the power of Google, I managed to come across the second way of doing the upgrade using the simple flasher software - also release by Samsung called Odin. This looked like a very elegant way of doing it compared to Kies because i could use the downloaded firmware file and use it offline in contrast to Kies which performs a long download.


The tutorial by Neal Pradeep is what I referred to and this had the clear guidelines on how to perform the upgrade. If you are someone waiting to do the Froyo upgrade, do follow this tutorial. He also has many other Android tutorials which are really handy.


So, once I got hold of the pre-requisites specified in the guide, I backed up all my data (sms, call history, contacts etc) and applications using a neat backup tool called My Backup. Then I started to perform the upgrade step by step as specified with my fingers crossed becasue I had no idea if I was about to throw hundreds of dollars away.


It was a matter of less than 20 mins, and voila!!! My Galaxy S was upgraded to Froyo!


Few things I noticed when I did the upgrade:

• In my case, Odin connected my mobile on 2 ID:COM ports. This is ok. If this happens to you just continue.
•  The PIT file we should download did not have the valid .pit extension. Add this manually in case you are not able to navigate to the file via Odin (should be trivial)
• Be patient once the phone gets restarted. The long first time boot up is really long! I had to wait for about 10 minutes.
• based on my experience, if it about flashing the phone, Odin seems to be a very elegant way of doing it.

	Previous	Current
Firmware version	2.1-update1	2.2.1
Baseband version	i9000XXJF3	I9000XXJPY
Kernel version	2.6.29 umts_scm@S1-BUILD05 #2	2.6.32.9 root@SE-S608 #1
Build number	ECLAIR	FROYO.XWJS7

Now if you'd excuse me, I have to attend to my Frozen Yogurt! :)