Upgrading the firmware on the SE W800
Last friday, I got my brand spankin’ new Sony Ericsson W800! This is most possibly the best phone I’ve ever had. I’m coming from the Samsung SGH D-500, which - frankly - is a piece of sh*te. It’s not bad, but compared to the SE, .. wow. I’ve been a fan of Nokia for a while, and have been ambivalent towards SE, Samsung and Siemens, so I was a bit baffled when I got the D-500. I still thought Nokia was the best. I guess you can compare it to coming from Windows to another operating system which does things differently and everything isn’t really integrated as much as one would want (read: linux), but ladies, SE is the Mac of cellphones. Everything just works (TM), and it works well. Anyway, back to the point: My bluetooth was a bit rusty, so I wanted to upgrade my firmware, which turned in to a living hell.
I’ve been praising this phone to the sky, but when it comes to something as “complex” as a firmware upgrade.. Boy, does SE have something to learn. First of, I couldn’t do this myself, because their upgrader SEUS(Sony Ericsson Update Service) runs in java on win32. More so, it runs a little applet through your browser (we had to use IE), which listens to your USB-port where you supposedly plug in your phone during a reboot, holding down the “C”-key, and it’ll all happen with flying colors. No. The fancy updater-applet didn’t find anything, and my phone rebooted just fine without any notice of it doing anything. I tried holding down the C-key all the way through the reboot-process even though it didn’t state I should. The instructions were obnoxiously vague. I basically tried every trick known to man. Being the windows guru that I am ([cough]), I tried opening the device manager of windows. Nothing in there showed up as broken (as if that means anything). I kept it open and tried rebooting the phone and doing the whole shebang again. Oooooh! Now a little “Flash USB Device” shows up for a few seconds and disappears. Could it be? Does this phone enter a state of a different device dedicated to the purpose of upgrading, only exposing itself for a few seconds, AND SE hasn’t installed this for me, even though I have every piece of fancy crappy design-ringtone-MMS-filetransfer software that came on the CD? Yes. So, here’s what you do. * Download and install the driver[1]. * Keep the device manager open. * Have the USB-cable plugged in to your computer. * Have the SEUS-updater running[2]. * Turn of your phone. * Wait until it’s blacked out (they state 20 seconds, more like 7 or 8). * Hold down the C-key on your phone, and insert the USB-cable. * Magic. It’ll state that it takes ~15 minutes, and it’ll go to about 43%, but then it’ll skip to 100% with supposedly 9 minutes left. Ah well. …and that, should do the trick. Did for me and my coworker, at least. fn1. “Generic D750/K750/W800 Driver”:http://www.sonyericsson.com/spg.jsp?cc=gb&lc=no&ver=4000&template=ps11321&zone=ps&lm=ps11&pid=10242&fid=15278&esi=true fn2. “Sony Ericsson Update Service”:http://www.sonyericsson.com/spg.jsp?cc=gb&lc=no&ver=4000&template=ps1157&zone=ps&lm=ps1_1&pid=10245
I’ll try this today and reports hows its goes.