Smartphone Snacks

Last night I fed my AT&T Samsung Galaxy S3 some jelly beans - that is, the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean update. AT&T / Samsung announced availability earlier this week. However, they also said there would be no over-the-air update. So this was a manual process - first installing Kies from Samsung.

The Kies install on Windows 7 x64 was kludgy. I started the install and it kept looping at "Installing Hotfix". I pressed "Cancel" and it warned me it hadn't completed the install and asked for a confirmation. I canceled that and allowed the install to continue and that seemed to skip out of the loop as the install proceeded and completed successfully.

The next step was to connect my GS3 to the computer with USB and Kies recognized it. I got a pop-up for the new firmware update and allowed it to go forward. A few confirmations and a very slow loading and update process followed. But again, SUCCESS!

I've only been exploring / using Jelly Bean for a few hours but it seems nice and smooth. I see I have an explicit "Driving Mode" (although I don't know what it does) even though I already side-loaded Google Car Home. I already had loaded Chrome as my default browser so that remained. I didn't like that the Accounts under "Settings" are now all listed in the main Settings menu rather than a sub menu. The previous sub menu had an icon regarding sync status for each account. Now you need to click into each account to see the sync status.

I haven't had a chance to try IPv6 yet. Previously, I would get IPv6 addresses via SLAAC on my home network, but I didn't have access to the IPv6 Internet. I'll do some testing in the next few days when I find the time.