Tag: Samsung Kies

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Technology

Where’s My Ice Cream?

Oooh, this isn’t supposed to happen.

You may remember a while ago I got fed up waiting for Vodafone to upgrade my phone’s “firmware” – that is to say, send out the newest version of Android. Google makes Android of course, but then the various phone manufacturers adapt it to their hardware. Finally the networks add their own modifications and extras.

If they can be bothered, it seems… Samsung took ages to get Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich, as she is known) ready for their Galaxy Note, and now it’s taking Vodafone Ireland months more to pass it on to us. Why? 02 Ireland released it in June. What the hell are Vodafone doing to it?

My guess would be putting in some awful advertising-partner crapware the customer is going to revile, but perhaps I’m too cynical¹.

So customers are getting increasingly pissed off – witness the acrimonious thread brewing on their support forums. Phones with the next major version of Android (4.1, or “Jelly Bean”) are beginning to hit the market, and we’re still waiting for 4.0. Myself I gave up on them, and did the upgrade at home using a non-Vodafone version of the firmware and some wood glue². All went well, except the program that’s supposed to look after all this took umbrage, and ever since has been curtly displaying the message “Your device does not support software upgrading by Kies”.

And yet here it is. Upgrading.

I don’t know whether to be excited or worried. It’s like being told that you’re getting a present, but that it first has to be extracted from your bottom using a corkscrew. Samsung’s “Kies” phone management software is, as I’ve mentioned before, an unhappy thing. I’m already on the second attempt here. The first time it spent about half an hour downloading the files for the upgrade. Once that was finished, it told me that it couldn’t recognise the phone and to restart it. Whereupon it begins to download those files all over again… That’s just basically idiotic, isn’t it?

And I don’t even know what this upgrade is. I’m just hoping that it’s the official Vodafone release of Android 4, including the “Premium Suite” of special Galaxy Note apps (and Angry Birds Space!) that Samsung promised in recompense for their part in the delay. ln theory that shouldn’t happen – you get updates to the version you have, not the one you’re meant to have – but I don’t know what else it could possibly be. Can’t wait until the download completes.

*          *          *          *

OK I fell asleep – after yet another failure and restart. But in the morning, after a few more restarts of both phone and PC, it finally worked.

The mystery update turns out to be not Vodafone’s build, but an upgrade to the generic one – from 4.0.3 to 4.0.4. Still no sign of the “Premium Suite”, which I expect will only come through the network. If it comes at all. At this point though I’m beginning to wonder if I want to get back onto Vodafone’s update stream, if people there are still stuck on Gingerbread (2.3) while I just got an update before I even heard it was available.

So what’s new? Performance improvements is all really, especially to the camera. Otherwise little major except… I almost daren’t say this for fear of seeing these words vanish before my eyes, but Google Chrome actually seems pretty stable now. That is devoutly to be wished for.

Mostly though, this is a polishing releases. Good and all, but not terribly exciting compared to Ice Cream Sandwich which pretty much made the Galaxy Note complete as an extraordinary cross between a phone and a notebook. It is the most useful device I’ve ever owned – a phone in my pocket that can do virtually everything I’d otherwise need to carry a PC or netbook or tablet for – and I’d recommend it to anyone.

Just don’t get it from Vodafone Ireland.

 

  1. I’m not too cynical.
  2. If you’re interested in the technical details, the wood glue is actually a very useful program called Odin.
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Technology

The Missing Kies

More Non-Fun With Samsung. It is amazing that a company rumoured to be the world’s No.1 phone maker can provide their customers with synchronisation software as enjoyable to use as being punched repeatedly in the face. Samsung Kies is slow, unstable, and just ill-conceived.

I decided to give it a thorough troubleshooting today, by removing anything on the computer that might have even a remote chance of interfering with it. My old Nokia syncing software, the crap that Apple piles on when you install Safari or iTunes – anything that might use Media Transfer Protocol basically – before removing and reinstalling Kies. It was a long shot, but it seemed to do some good. At least it will show thumbnails of photos now. That’s… something.

But I must confess – I discovered eventually that Kies wasn’t really failing to accomplish a basic task as I’d thought. It simply doesn’t do that task. Foolish me. Why would I think that a function with a name like “Sync Photos” would sync photos? My naïveté just appals me sometimes.

You see I wanted it to copy the pictures I’d taken with the phone and save them to the computer. On most parts of planet Earth that would mean creating a folder on your computer that always contains the same photographs as the phone. In, as we call it, sync.

For Samsung’s Kies however, syncing photos means copying them from the computer, to the phone. Because that’s what you want to do, isn’t it? Un-backup your pictures. Samsung it seems are so pleased with their phones that they think we’ll want to put all our photos on them, to show them off to their best advantage.

More seriously, they’re envisaging the phone as your central device, your hub. Things move to the phone, not away. All nice in theory, but complete crap in practice. The reality is that both for the sake of convenience and of  backing-up, you want the same files on both your phone and your computer. Synchronisation, as the name suggests, should be a two-way street.

(The cloud? If you have an Android phone you may have found it automatically uploading your photos to your Google account. The way of the future, right. The problem with the cloud is it’s altogether too nebulous. I’m not at all happy entrusting every picture I take to someone who mysteriously doesn’t even want paying for the service.)

So Kies won’t copy my pictures to the computer as a part of an automated syncing process. I have to do it manually. Which means I have to remember to do it manually. This is not good enough. All I want, ideally, is software that will copy my photographs. As well as synchronise any new contact info and events with my computer’s address book and calendar. Maybe copy over other important data too, like sketches I make on it. In the other direction, possibly copy any newly-downloaded podcasts to the phone so that I can listen to them on the move. And it would be nice if it could do that all automatically when I plugged my phone into the computer to charge. That’s not too much to ask, is it?

Nope, not thanks to the Austrian guy who developed MyPhoneExplorer. This is everything that Kies should be but isn’t. On top of that it has some interesting features that Kies doesn’t think to include, like the facility to use your phone from your computer when it’s connected, making and taking calls and even typing texts on your keyboard. Plus it can archive your text messages, or indeed keep any data or application on the phone backed up.

It may take some time to set up – read the very useful help pages – but that’s because it can be made to do precisely what you want. And it’s free, though it does ask you to donate. You should. The amount of heartache it will save you is well worth a few euros. He has made life better.

Update: I should have mentioned that when installing it offers to give you a couple of other freeware programs. You can decline these though, and on principle I recommend that you do.

Works on most Android phones, not just Samsung’s, as well as Symbians from Sony Ericsson.

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http://www.fjsoft.at/en/downloads.php

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Technology

Kies To The Shitty

Samsung Kies

There can be little doubt that Samsung makes a fine phone. They make a few crappy ones too of course; a friend of mine has the Galaxy Y, which actually hurts slightly to look at. It is fair to say though that with the Galaxy S II, Nexus, and Note, they make three of the best phones you can buy.

But if one thing lets all of them down, it’s Kies. This is the software they provide for connecting their phones to computer, which you’d use for example to transfer music to the phone or photographs from it. Or, to synchronise the contacts on your phone and computer. That’s such a useful function that it’s one of the main reasons I use a smartphone. Having just one version of all your email addresses and phone numbers, kept in sync across all your devices, is heaven compared to the situation a few years ago when I had some addresses in one webmail account, some in another, some on the computer, some phone numbers on the SIM, some in phone memory, some more in another phone’s memory…

These are Android phones of course, so you can just do it the Google way and sync all your contacts with Gmail. Which is fine, but I don’t really want to put all my eggs into Google’s basket. Plus I use other email addresses as well.

So what I do is funnel all my email accounts into Microsoft Outlook. That not only gives me a way to gather all my contacts together, but allows me to read old Gmail and other webmail even when not online. (It’s simple enough to set up, and if you prefer you can use another email client like Thunderbird.) That makes it easy to ensure I don’t have multiple versions of the same contact with slightly different names, defunct numbers and so on. A bit of a pain, but so much better to do now than when you need to call someone. Then it’s usually a simple matter to sync the contacts in your phone with the ones in Outlook.

Unless you’re doing it with Samsung Kies, which takes bloody forever and fails almost incessantly. Time after time, the process would hang at 64% complete. Giving up and unplugging the phone, I find that it got stuck on one contact or another and copied it over and over and over again. Shit.

It can be hard, considering you’re syncing not just Outlook with your phone, but your phone with Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc., to pinpoint exactly where things are going awry. But it seems it came down to a few malformed address book entries knocking Kies for a loop. Things like a hyphen appearing at the start of a name field. I’m sorry Samsung, but that’s ridiculous.

I think I’ve combed these idiosyncrasies out by now (fingers crossed). It actually completes the sync anyway. Right now though it’s using almost half a Gig of memory just to display the contacts on my phone. It took forever to even reach this point, and now they are finally visible my computer is too constipated to let me scroll through them. Oh, and it also cannot transfer my audio and video files because I don’t have a sound card fitted at the moment. I don’t need to play them, or convert them, or run these media files in any way, just copy them from A to B. But because it can find no hardware, Kies won’t even acknowledge their existence.

And it takes forever to load, and it’s confusing to use, and it’s shockingly unresponsive. It is just a breathtakingly badly-designed piece of software. I used to think Nokia’s Ovi Suite was a bit of a mess. Ovi is a futuristic dream compared to this. It’s as if Samsung were so keen to outdo Apple that they even decided to make something more annoying than iTunes.

Samsung make great hardware, and the software actually on the phones seems to be excellent too, but Kies could really undermine your confidence.

I’ll get back to you when I figure out how to live without it.

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