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Mobile Phone Upgrade Adventures
Oct. 24th, 2012 11:17 amYesterday's automatic Android upgrade on my Motorola Droid Bionic didn't exactly go as it should.
As mentioned previously, it downloaded and installed decently. It then 'optimized' the resident applications and attempted to update the app databases. And that's when things didn't go quite as planned.
It seemed the upgrading of the media database took forever. Indeed, after several hours, it effectively drained the battery. I manually forced a restart but it looked as though the 'upgrade' continued in the background, sucking up CPU time and remaining battery life. Many of the built-in functions didn't work at first, each one waking up slowly about one per half-hour. It started up, great! A half-hour later, I was finally able to use wifi connectivity. A half-hour after that, GPS functions came back. A half-hour later, GMail was working. And so it went.
By the evening, however, I had had enough: while I could receiving telephone calls, there was no ringing and it refused to let me access the ring tone settings. When a phone is only partially usable as a phone, there's a problem.
When I got home from my evening's square dance gig, I backed up my personalizations, removed the 32GB SD-RAM card and hit the metaphoric big red button to reset the beast to factory settings. It rebooted fairly quickly into ICS, then proceeded as though it was a brand new phone (as it should). I restored my preferences & apps and voilà all is back to where it should be. I have a working telephone (now ringing!), all of my email is syncing and so on. The alerts operate differently but that's not a big deal.
I'm still testing all of the functions to be sure they work as they should. I need the mobile hotspot functions and IRC for work. I need also confirm it can make emergency work-related txt messages from work squawk in a truly obnoxious attention-getting fashion. Perhaps Winamp's playlist won't suffer from amnesia in this version. Still, so far, so good.
The remade phone seems to operate a little faster than the older Gingerbread version. The interface seems a lot crisper. I love beyond all reason the default system fonts: they strike my amateur eyes as cleaner and better formed. The biggest question in mind is whether the battery life is any better than it was under the old version. That will take about a week of use. More later.
As mentioned previously, it downloaded and installed decently. It then 'optimized' the resident applications and attempted to update the app databases. And that's when things didn't go quite as planned.
It seemed the upgrading of the media database took forever. Indeed, after several hours, it effectively drained the battery. I manually forced a restart but it looked as though the 'upgrade' continued in the background, sucking up CPU time and remaining battery life. Many of the built-in functions didn't work at first, each one waking up slowly about one per half-hour. It started up, great! A half-hour later, I was finally able to use wifi connectivity. A half-hour after that, GPS functions came back. A half-hour later, GMail was working. And so it went.
By the evening, however, I had had enough: while I could receiving telephone calls, there was no ringing and it refused to let me access the ring tone settings. When a phone is only partially usable as a phone, there's a problem.
When I got home from my evening's square dance gig, I backed up my personalizations, removed the 32GB SD-RAM card and hit the metaphoric big red button to reset the beast to factory settings. It rebooted fairly quickly into ICS, then proceeded as though it was a brand new phone (as it should). I restored my preferences & apps and voilà all is back to where it should be. I have a working telephone (now ringing!), all of my email is syncing and so on. The alerts operate differently but that's not a big deal.
I'm still testing all of the functions to be sure they work as they should. I need the mobile hotspot functions and IRC for work. I need also confirm it can make emergency work-related txt messages from work squawk in a truly obnoxious attention-getting fashion. Perhaps Winamp's playlist won't suffer from amnesia in this version. Still, so far, so good.
The remade phone seems to operate a little faster than the older Gingerbread version. The interface seems a lot crisper. I love beyond all reason the default system fonts: they strike my amateur eyes as cleaner and better formed. The biggest question in mind is whether the battery life is any better than it was under the old version. That will take about a week of use. More later.
