Yum! Ice Cream Sandwich

Yeah, yeah. I know I've blogged about Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) before. But that was on my Nook Color.

This is about Ice Cream Sandwich on my Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket (isn't that a mouthful?).

The Skyrocket came with Gingerbread. ICS for the Skyrocket has been out since July 2012 so my plans were to immediately upgrade to ICS.

I had prepared for this by studying Samsung's guide. This is a really thorough step-by-step guide.

When I was buying the Skyrocket I mentioned to the sales person (who was excellent by the way) that I was planning to upgrade as soon as I got home. She cautioned me and said they had replaced several Skyrockets that people had tried to upgrade. "At least do it in the first 30 days so we can do a store exchange for you." was her advice! Not very reassuring.

By the way, the sales person exchanged my Captivate's SIM card for an "LTE" SIM card. She did the activation so my number was live on the new SIM when I left the store.

She did offer me a number to call to speak to a Samsung expert at AT&T regarding the upgrade. Turned out that was just the normal AT&T customer support but they did have a representative that was knowledgeable on the upgrade.

Her advice was to make sure that the SIM card was removed before starting the process. If the phone rings in the middle of the process the phone could be bricked. As I had taken the new SIM card out of the phone at the AT&T store I was ready.

She stayed on the phone with me until the new image was downloading. We agreed on a time that she would call me back and I sat and watched.

The laptop I used was the same one that I had used to flash Gingerbread on my Captivate. That process used Kies Lite and the ICS process called for the full Kies.

As the process proceeded I got a message from Windows 7 (32-bit by the way) that a driver had failed to install. Then the upgrade process stopped and eventually got a "timed out" message. The message told me to where to restart the process.

This time it went perfect. Overall it probably took less than an hour. The image had to re-download which was the biggest time.

The AT&T customer service representative did actually call me back! By that time I was installing apps on the Skyrocket.