You’d be forgiven for thinking that updating your phone’s firmware would be a relatively simple task. That certainly was not the case today though.

The plan was to update my Sony Ericsson C905 in the hope that it would fix the annoying problem I’ve been having accessing the internet 90% of the time.

In the morning I fiddled on and off for the best part of 3 hours trying to get the Sony Ericsson PC Suite and the third part MyPhoneExplorer to work. I wanted to backup the data on my phone, i.e. contacts and sms messages, as updates wipe your phone. Surely that would take a few minutes, tops?

The initial issue was that the phone wasn’t detected properly by the software even though the drivers had been installed and Windows could recognise the device. I installed and reinstalled the software, I tried running with different compatibility settings and I even switched back and forth between Windows 7 and Windows XP. But by the end of it I’d still not achieved a successful backup!

In the evening I had another stab at it and decided to try my old laptop which has the Japanese version of Windows XP installed on it. Thankfully things started to work, though I had to backup individual settings separately as the phone would keep timing out! I’d recommend MyPhoneExplorer to because it can backup SMS messages whereas the Sony Ericsson PC Suite can’t(!).

After the backup I launched the software update tool which worked thankfully worked painlessly. When I restarted the phone it took a few minutes (with no moving progress bars after the first 10 seconds when it had already reached 100%) but it then powered on and I had to start setting the phone up from scratch.

I restored the backups taken with MyPhoneExplorer and I now have my contacts and messages back. When I was checking the messages had been restored I noticed a new feature - the phone can now display messages in a conversation view like a Gmail or an iPhone. Nice!

So after about five hours of frustration I have an updated phone with all the data preserved and the best part? The internet works! I’ll just have to pray that it keeps on working this time around.