Last Thursday night when I turned my phone on for the first time that week, I was pleasantly surprised to find there was finally a operating system (OS) update for my phone's OS running Gingerbread. Since I had been anxious to try Chrome on my phone and it was only available on Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), the OS update, I immediately chose to go ahead and update to ICS 4.0.4. Since the Jellybean update has already come out I thought I would be happy to be only one generation behind the latest OS after a year of waiting for ICS due to Sprint and Samsung being so slow to release the update.
The Samsung Galaxy S2 phone had always worked flawlessly, until...
The update went very smooth and the phone rebooted with the new OS. I used the phone for Twitter, Facebook and SMS messages that night and went to bed happy that my phone had finally been updated to the long promised ICS.
Then I woke up and found the Wi-Fi wasn't connected, even though it showed a strong signal and said it was connected to my home Wi-Fi. I restarted the phone using the new Restart choice on power off. The Wi-Fi connected after the restart. Later I noticed the Wi-Fi had quit working again. This time I chose to cycle the Wi-Fi alone rather than restarting the phone. Again the phone connected to the Wi-Fi. Being in the same room as the Wi-Fi router doesn't seem to help the problem. This pattern has continued ever since.
All other Wi-Fi devices continue to work normally.
This morning, Sunday, I was trying to add a comment to someone's Facebook entry. I tried using the "Speak Now' function and found it didn't work. I canceled the attempt and decided to try Speak Now in another application. I tried SMS texting and then tried a note taking application I had installed. Neither of these applications worked with Speak Now. I can only guess what other "features" no longer work. This update, which is most definitely not an upgrade, has turned into a disaster.
I have tried googling for suggestions to fix the Wi-Fi issue and have tried some of the suggestions. There appear to be a lot of people having related issues. I tried setting the Wi-Fi to only connect at 2.4GHz rather than the default of auto, which had the most hope, but it didn't work. None of the suggestions appear to fix the problem. Now I can look forward to dealing with Sprint and Samsung support for fixing these problems if even they know how. Given Sprint and Samsung's track record on releasing updates a year or more after they are available doesn't make the future of this phone look promising.
Makes me consider all the promises made with the Samsung Galaxy S3 that just came out. They all promise the world when they come out and never live up to expectations. All I want is a smartphone that works and uses the current operating system. Since an iPhone isn't an option since I can't stand their control-freak attitude, and Microsoft seems too incompetent to release a phone of any sort I may just go back to a dumb phone.
