Finally… After a whole damn lot of time, Samsung finally decided to release the Android 2.2 update for the Galaxy Apollo I5800. A lot of people are having trouble installing the update though and a lot of googling and a lucky hit after an entire afternoon got me as far as finding out that updating with the phone connected to a Windows 7 machine isn’t going to work. I tried to run the updater on the Windows 7 installation on Centurion 4 times and it failed every time. The update starts running, then hangs, phone reboots, nothing has changed, Kies (Samsungs crappy desktop software) crashes when the phone is disconnected.
The only solution I could find was to try running the update on Windows XP. Luckily I created a dual boot on Centurion with Windows XP recently to be able to play One Must Fall: Battlegrounds. And guess what… It worked. I don’t know why it doesn’t work on Windows 7, nor do I know if it’ll work on Windows Vista, but I do know that it works on Windows XP and I have to say that this update is a must have for anyone who has a Galaxy Apollo. It makes the phone faster and smoother. It gets the Android 2.2 task manager, so you no longer need any third party crap to take care of resource consuming apps that you don’t need to be running all the time and it has new sweet looking icons. We always need more sweet looking icons ^.^
However, it’s not likely that everyone who owns a Galaxy Apollo is somewhat of a tech head like me. Most tech heads who have Android phones have the more high end models like the Galaxy S or HTC Desire HD. This probably means that not everyone who owns a Galaxy Apollo and runs Windows 7 on his/her PC will know how to build a dual boot setup, nor do they want to. But there is also a second, probably more convenient way of getting XP running and updating your phone: virtual machines.
A virtual machine is kind of like a PC running inside your PC. So you install a program like Microsoft Virtual PC, VMWare Workstation or Virtualbox. The first and last being free and the middle one being rather expensive. Virtualbox will be your best choice. You can get it here. Just install the program using the recommended settings (or change some settings just for the sake of it) and then use the wizard to create your virtual machine with the recommended settings. For the purpose of this firmware upgrade it won’t need any more. When the virtual machine is created, all you need is a Windows XP installation CD or ISO (or perhaps both) to mount in the virtual machine to start installing Windows XP on it. Don’t worry about having to activate it as you will only need it for a few minutes. Installing the machine will very likely take more time that actually updating the firmware of the phone. I strongly recommend using an ISO image, as this is a lot faster than using a CD.
The virtual machine will need an internet connection for this to work, so make sure the machine gets a network connection. The default settings are usually good.
When Windows has finished installing, you go to samsung.com from within the virtual machine and download and install Kies. By default a newly connected USB device on the host system will be redirected to the virtual machine if the virtual machine window has focus. So after installing Kies, simply connect your phone to a free USB slot and it’ll be picked up by Virtualbox and loaded into the virtual machine. At this point the phone will connect to Kies and Kies will automatically display the firmware update message and you can proceed with updating your phone. Good luck.
