Connecting KIES to the Samsung Galaxy S

 

I have waited until today to update my SGS to Froyo and installed KIES finally. After reading the horror stories about KIES, you can imagine my expectations. It was actually not that horrifying. However I did keep having an issue connecting the phone to the KIES. The Galaxy MTP application says it is connected, but in KIES it states it is trying to connect.

To keep a long story short, while your phone is connected, right click on My Computer, select Device Manager and you will probably see an entry called GT-I900 with a warning sign.

Right click, select uninstall and then disconnect.

Connect the phone again, and Windows will install the drivers again, and you should be able to connect with KIES.

Samsung Galaxy S Tips

I was just surfing and encountered some tips on the usage of the Samsung Galaxy S which will help me/you to get the most of this excellent phone.

1. Contact screen: Swipe to left to create a text/SMS message to the contact
2. Contact screen: Swipe to right to call the contact immediately
3. Contact screen: Move your finger in the alphabet to quickly navigate to a contact starting with the letter, then while pressing move to left to move within that letter, eg. after D you can navigate in everything starting with D by moving to the left
4. Press and hold HOME key to get a list of recently used apps, which can be used to switch between applications (not specific to SGS)
5. Press menu and Edit in the home screen to delete and/or reorder the home pages. In order to reorder: touch and hold the screen which will allow to drag them
6. If your brightness is not set to auto, you can swipe from left to right in the notification bar to set brightness to maximum and the right to left to set brightness to minimum.
7. You can have the SGS announce the title/artist of a song from the Music player by pressing and holding the Up Volume button while a song is playing
8. You can "lock screen" while watching video by pressing Power Button while a video is playing. This is great at preventing unintended clicks while holding the phone watching a video
9. In the browser: Access to the bookmark button and address bar by tapping the Menu button (no need to scroll all the way up)
10. Open soft D-Pad by tap-and-hold the "?123" key on the standard Samsung Keyboard or swipe from the Swype button to the SYM button in the Swype Keyboard
11. Pressing and holding the Power button (keep pressing it after you get the shutdown/airplane dialog) will perform a reset.
12. Holding the Menu key for a second, will bring up the search dialog (emulating the search button available in other Android phones)
13. You lock the camera screen to only take a shot, by pressing the Power button for a very short time. This will show a paddock on screen.
14. When receiving a call press the volume down button to mute the ringer
15. Use the volume +/- in camera mode to zoom in and out

For more technical tips see the also the XDA forum and see also a list of cool apps to use with the SGS.

Samsung Galaxy MTP keeps repeating “Initializing” when connected to USB

I have been using a Samsung Galaxy for a few weeks now and it has been the best phone ever. I think Samsung has really got a phone which can blow away the iPhone (4) without any problems. After installing the voodoo fix for the lag issue, it has been extremely fast. Just now waiting for the Froyo (Android 2.2) release and my life will be complete :)

Anyway, today I connected my Galaxy to my PC, and for the first time something strange happened. The MTP application for KIES on the phone kept initializing. It tries to initialize but for some reason it dies and then the whole process starts all over again, actually funny to see. However this meant I was unable to access my phone from my PC. I needed some Google-fu. After a while I found the solution, it seems that if you have any files with an extension longer then 16 characters, the MTP application just looses it.

For me the solution was to start up my favorite file manager (ES File Explorer) and remove the TunnyBrowser folder. This folder is used by the Dolphin browser I have been using for a while now. If the issue still exists and you are using Soundhound try also removing the SoundHound cache folder. If this does not help, get your SD card out and search for files with long extensions.

Hope this helps if you have the similar issue