techiehenry

This afternoon we went to my parents’ house to celebrate the feast of the Holy Child (Santo Nino). As with all Filipino Catholic feasts, there’s lots of food and celebration until the wee hours of the morning. I was also there for another purpose. My sister’s PC got infected with spyware and she asked me to clean things for her. With that came the idea of upgrading the firmware of my new phone.

Now, why would I do the upgrade thing on another PC and not mine? Let’s check the system requirements for the Sony Ericsson Update Service, or SEUS:

• Adobe Flash Player installed using Internet Explorer
• Internet connection (preferably broadband)
• Depending on your phone model, you need DSS-25 Deskstand, DSS-25 compatible phones or DCU-60 USB cable, DCU-60 compatible phones
• Windows 2000, Windows XP

The thing needs Windows to run! I’m on Linux, and there’s NO WAY any Windows operating system would be installed in it. I wonder how the Mac diehards would react to this, even they were left out in the cold.
However, I admit that I need to do the firmware upgrade. The firmware installed out of the box on my phone is R1ED001 and it has this nasty bug wherein the text is not displayed properly at times. One of those times was when I got an incoming call from my wife, and I forgot where the answer key is located in one of the softkeys. I ended up rejecting the call.

After reformatting the computer’s hard disk and reinstalling all the basic applications (which now includes ClamAV antivirus, Spybot, and PCTools Personal Firewall), I proceeded to install the software needed to do the firmware upgrade. Installation is threefold, since this is a first-time installation of all the phone related apps:

1. The PC Suite and the supporting applications (Disc2Phone and QuickTime) gets installed first.
2. Next would be the K800i-related drivers after connecting my phone to the USB port.
3. The last would be the actual SEUS application which I downloaded from the Sony Ericsson website, version 2.6.11.7 at the time of writing.

Upon running SEUS it proceeded to download some updates from the internet. That took just a short while, maybe less than ten minutes. Then it requested me to remove the phone’s SIM and press the C button while connecting the phone to the USB port. It again caused Windows to download several more drivers. After installing the drivers, the phone was checked to determine its model and current firmware version, and the actual firmware download took place. Half of the time the latest firmware was downloaded from the net to local storage, the latter half was spent updating the downloaded firmware to the phone. The whole process from running SEUS to the completion of the firmware download took less than an hour on my sister’s machine. After restarting the phone I checked the firmware using the Service Info screen in the Service Menu (which could be accessed by pressing the following key sequence — Right, *, Left, Left, *, Left, *):

R1GB001
prgCXC1250214_CHINA
_WI R1GB001

EROM: R3A016
prgCXC1250461_EROM
_DB2020_WILMA_FOT
A_SIMLOCK_FLAFLA_SI
BLEY_SEMCUSB

LCD SW versions
Main display
Current: 200610121

Camera SW versions
Camera
Current: 2.5
Video call camera
Current: 2.3

ITP SW version
CXC 125 0310 R2N

Customization
CDA102568/101 R5A
cxc1250490 R1GB001
APAC
Memory Stick: No file
found

Content version
PA24
Memory Stick: No file
found

Java SW version
JP-7.2

Text Revision:
BJ

Update service SW
UA version:
CRH1069179 R3B021
2006-10-12 08:47

So there you have it. Latest firmware at the time of writing this entry is R1GB001. Now’s a great time to check for new bugs.

I showed everything to my sister, who got a W900i as a graduation gift last year. I think she got curious about the whole firmware upgrade thing, but she’s reluctant to do so since she isn’t seeing anything broken with the present firmware in her phone.

P.S.: Somebody might comment that if I didn’t want to install Windows on my PC, I could have gone to an authorized service center to get the job done. Actually, I called up Semicon and they told me that they charge Php 500 for the firmware upgrade. Next I went to Sony Ericsson showroom in Digital Exchange at the Glorietta, and they told me that they charge Php350. I can’t make myself bite the offer since I learned from the SE personnel that the process they do to update the firmware would almost be the same as that of doing everything online. Why pay when I can do it for free with someone else’s computer?