Thursday, August 4, 2011

Droid Rage

The new Android operating system for year-old Verizon Droids was available for me today. It's not a new operating system, just new to me. And other Verizon users with a Droid X.

It's not that new fancy Honeycomb (Android 3.0) that everybody raves about and no one has seen. No, it's the 7-month-old Gingerbread (Android 2.3) that most newer devices run.

Well, it was finally available for me today. And, this morning, I downloaded it.

The whole idea of upgrading an operating system over a network can be scary. Because, if something goes wrong, you can't retry. Because without a working operating system, you don't have a working system. You have what's commonly called a "brick."

I ran the update, and everything seemed to go well. Until the last step, where the phone reboots. That's when the screen filled, went black, filled again, went black, then showed the top banner ... and nothing else.

Touch screen didn't work. Buttons didn't work. The only thing I could do was take the battery out, which is a reboot.

Then things repeated themselves.

I had a brick.

So, at lunch, it was off to the Verizon store.

Amanda was the young lady that assisted me. And, after two trips to the back, she came back out with a working phone. Same phone. But she had to do a hard reset. Which wipes everything.

So, I'm setting up my Droid. Again. But it's working.

So, what did we learn?

Well, here's what I want you to take away from it. If you're running Android 2.2 on your phone, and are ready to update to 3.3, wait until you have some time to kill, and make sure there's a Verizon store nearby. Just in case.

1 comment:

  1. Same thing happened to my Iphone. Upgrade in OS means back up everything first and cross your fingers and plan to go to the store to fix what you screwed up.

    ReplyDelete

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