I had another fun adventure this weekend. Trying to upgrade the firmware on the sony Ericsson Xperia. This is easy enough…..that is if you are running Windows XP.

Downloading and installing the Sony Ericsson Update Service softrware and getting it set up is easy enough, but here it gets a little tricky.

The first tricky thing is that to put the phone into the update mode, where it shows the horizonal colour bands, which you need to do so that the update program can update the phone, is not as easy as advertised. To do so requires you to first press the volume button, and then the power button while holding down the volume button, and then keep both pressed until the phone switches on.

It took me several attempts to get this right, because if you get don’t press the buttons exactly right, it goes into normal mode, which you don’t want.

Now I encountered the second problem. I am running Windows Vista, and after putting the phone into update mode, the update application refused to pick up that the phone was connected. After reading a few forums, I tried running the application in my Windows XP VM I have on my machine, and it read the phone perfectly.

At this point I understood why they said you had to charge your phone fully before attempting an update. The update is a 160MB download, so unless you have a decent internet connection, this part is going to take a rather long time. I have a 3G connection, and it was relatively quick, but still rather painful.

Once the download completes, the phone gets updated and this part is rather quick.

After that whole operation I was pleased to notice a lot of the system settings had been kept, such as the internet connection settings. I did need to reinstall all my downloaded apps though, and set up my mail again, but all in all, the upgrade process was not too bad.

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