Help ICS Upgrade on unlocked Orange France Samsung GS2

[treddy_kh]

From very useful threads in these forums, I think I've worked out that rooting is not what I am after, and I think I have determined that my phone is unlocked but not unbranded...but I'm still short of understanding what I need to do to upgrade my GS2 to ICS 4.0.

1. Unlocked: I have an Orange France GT-I9100, for which I purchased a plan. After three months I was allowed, via a tool on their website, to unlock it so that I can put my (non-French) SIM in it. This works fine.

2. Unbranded: The phone came with a bunch of Orange.fr applications and widgets on it, which I would generally prefer not to have and just have native Android (or Samsung's own additions) if possible.

I'm not sure in this instance, where I should expect to get an upgrade from - Samsung, Orange, or...?

I have downloaded and installed Kies with the idea that this might identify availability of an upgrade for me. It has found an available update.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

About Phone:
GT-I9100
Android 2.3.3
Baseband I9100BVKG2
Kernel 2.6.35.7-I9100BVKG2-CLTEST_I9100BVKG2 root@DELL127#2
Build Number Gingerbread.BVKG2
Finally, using Check for Updates on the About Phone menu says none are available.

 

[Rush]

Hello and welcome to the community.

I moved your thread to its correct forum, hopefully to get some responses from other users of this device.

 

[treddy_kh]

Thanks Rush.
in fact i had just found a bunch of useful
answers to my question in the GS2 forum.

i'd not considered that the question revolved around the model of phone rather than the carrier or current OS version. not the same as PCs then!
Cheers

 

[Forbidden 403]

Please go through this thread to first confirm whether an official version of ICS has been released for your phone or not. If it has been released then we can surely find some way to do a proper upgrade.

ics-csc-you-eligible-update

 

[treddy_kh]

So my CSC is FTM. so from the list it seems I am not yet able to upgrade. I note that Kies says there is a firmware update available but have not yet tried it or seen what version it is to.

But if I have unlocked my phone, with the carrier's permission, does it still have e same eligibility criteria as an FTM? If I am happy to ditch all the Orange.fr stuff that came with it, does this change the answer?

 

[treddy_kh]

So the list of CSCs ready for upgrade was really helpful and I was happy to see FTM "go bold."
But after numerous efforts I still have not managed to get the upgrade to work.
Is Kies the only way?

I've gone through a number of steps lots of times and seem to have a different failure each time:
"Failed to run firmware upgrade. Unknown error occurred."
Operation timed out while downloading the file for the firmware upgrade..
No response from the server (maybe my internet connection has dropped out but only momentarily).
Some times I have left the upgrade running only to come back to my desk and find no sign of it except that the phone is no longer connected to Kies.
I have put the phone in airplane mode in case incoming texts/emails/calls might be interrupting it.

Has anyone managed to upgrade an unlocked, Orange France SGS2?

 

[treddy_kh]

Yes finally it worked! Am not sure what made the difference. Maybe airline mode meant no interruptions? Am really not sure but finally i have ICS.
My next mission is to work out what drives the difference between what I expect to see and what I actually get. Is it Samsung's overlay or Orange France's?
I found a PCWorld website describing the changes in 4.0 with screenshots but many of ghe apparent changes are not visible to me and my screen looks more like the Pre-ICS images in the slides.

 

[yodiyo]

Yes, I've been having the same problem. There even seems to be an option to update the unlocked galaxy s2 over the air and I was hopeful, but it didn't work, telling me so and to use Kies.

Using Kies, it downloads the first batch of "components" ok but then seems to lock on the second batch and eventually says server times out.

It didn't help that my broadband service (virgin) decided to pack up sometime in the middle of doing all this. Pain in the...!!

I'll try the airplane mode. See if that helps. Thanks.

 

[yodiyo]

Yes, it worked I now have ics on my phone.

Just need to work out why it keeps crashing every time I try to do something!

Thanks!