Updating the SE K600i with Sony's Update Service

[Hands0n]

It is a bit old in the tooth now that almost a year has gone by since it was launched. But the SE K600i is a steady little workhorse that proved quite popular on most of the networks. It is very ....... Sony.

My good lady, her inside of the doors, she who must be obeyed, The Manager, etc. decided on one of these when I finally got her to upgrade to 3G on her old O2 account (I'll not go into the lack of wisdom of that right here!). And so a few days later the K600i arrived and she was pleased as the proverbial dog with two pairs of danglies. Its shiny. She's easily pleased Must be to have been hanging around with me for all of these years

Since receipt the handset has almost never been able to hang onto a 3G signal, it is very frustrating as it cannot be reliably used for 3G working such as Videocalling (a family favourite). All a bit pi55y seeing as O2 charge for Videocalling as regular voice minutes - until the end of this year at least. I've tried everyting, including silly amounts of time on the blower to the O2 CS desk who are sympathetic and singularly ineffective!

I'm told it is the handset. I'm told it is the local mast (wot? all of them in the area?). I'm sure the last said something about there being an R in the month!

Anyway, enough of this .... I decided to try and update the handset's firmware to see if that helped in any way at all. It came with R2T002 and the latest (unbranded) is supposed to be R2BB01.

I downloaded the SE Updater from the SE website and bought a DCU-11 data cable from EBay for a fiver. Deep joy, much cheaper than the £19 elsewhere.

The Updater software is a cinch to install, but you must ensure that you have the latest Macromedia Flash Player installed to Internet Explorer (not Firefox or any other browser). It will not work if you don't.

Next problem - the set up did not work! While the software ran, and the PC detected the handset via the USB cable, the Updater simply did not do anything at all. I tried simply everything I could think of ..... except RTFM!

After much tugging of the hair I finally found the clue on the web page for the Updater which said

Depending on your phone model, you need DSS-25 Deskstand, DSS-25 compatible phones or DCU-60 USB cable, DCU-60 compatible phones

Feck!

Another trip to EBay and a DSS-25 Deskstand was purchased for a tenner (cheaper than the £21 seen elsewhere) and within 48 hours it arrived. Phew! This is turning into an epic!!

You will be pleased to know, if you have read this far, that the rest of the tale has a happy ending - sort of.

The Updater recognised the SE K600i almost immediately it was plugged into the DSS-25 Deskstand. The Updater recognised that it was a K600i from O2 then went off and downloaded the firmware from SE, which it then installed to the handset. The entire updating process took no more than 15 minutes on a 10Mbps broadband link. It did take longer to upload into the handset than it took to get from the SE fileservers.

Pleasant surprises - I did a full back up of the SE K600i to my desktop PC, I also copied all the Contacts info to the USIM. However, it did appear to be not necessary. The update process retained all of the settings, Contacts and other files and info previously stored on the handset. There was no loss at all.

The firmware is now at R2AE001 (previously R2T002).

Unpleasant surprises - I do not know what it fixes but it has made zero difference to the handset's ability to pick up an O2 3G signal. My next step is to unlock the K600i and see if it fares any better with 3G on another network. Shame really, its a great little handset and I do not read many complaints about it (unless I hang out in the wrong places).

Next time Mrs contract comes up for renewal I am going to eschew O2 for two reasons - (1) the 3G problem and (2) the CS problem, they don't listen.