Timetravel Made Possible With The Samsung Galaxy S2

And yes. Another rant from an Apple fan-boy (I guess).

As you can read here, I have a Samsung Galaxy S2 at home, and the device is still in the original box. I did open the box, just to check the device, and as you may have read; the device went straight back into the box. Since then, it has been out of the box about four times, and not more than an hour. The main reason (for getting it out of the box) is that there a software updates that should fix problems with the device. I guess not the problems I have with the device..... I want to give the device a chance. I really do, but they don't come close to the Apple iOS experience. The Android eco-system has still light years to go.

It started with the Kies application not functioning properly in OS X (it did recognize the device, but was not able to update it). This was fixed after updating the phone (which I had to do on another PC with Windows.....). After that I was able to connect the Galaxy S2 to my Mac, and it seemed to work.

Then came the Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) OS for Android (v4.x). This OS should make it a better device, but my experiences with the devices weren't getting any better. It still felt as a (cheap) rip-off of the iOS software. I often use the Linux analogy; The OS won't (ever) come close to OS X and Windows, because there are to many flavors. No Linux distribution is the same. Same goes for the Android phones and its operating system. Just to many flavors.

This means that the applications for those devices need to support all these flavors. This results in crappy software that works for 50% on 50% of the devices (this is an educated guess on my part), and this is my experience:

This week I updated the phone from Android version 4.something to 4.0.4. The reason for doing this was that some colleagues had problems with this update, and they wanted a test on a phone without all the (crappy) apps. So I told them that I would give it a try.

The update installed by using the wifi connection (nice), and gave no real problems, so all is good. Then I read that v4.1 is available. So I could do another update. Unfortunately, the phone said there was no new update. As an alternative I tried the [sarcasm]excellent[/sarcasm] Kies application to verify if there was an update.

Launching Kies resulted in an update notification. I installed the update and rebooted(???).

The new Kies application was installed, so I attached the Galaxy S2, and the application won't recognize the phone...... This feels like I travelled back in time. Back to november 11th in 2011.

So the device goes back into the box. Just as it did on November 11th 2011.