Captivate JH7 Firmware Update

[Neurofreeze]

Unfortunately we didn't get Froyo this week. The update is about 12-15MB download I believe. Most people on the XDA forums are having a very tough time updating, some even bricking their phones. They have not figured out exactly what prevents a successful update. Some root users have been successful, some not. Some with lagfixes have been successful, some not. Generally most of the successes have been with people who flashed completely stock, factory default, ROMs.

•Preinstalled software - QuickOffice for Android will allow users to edit various Microsoft Office documents.
•Messaging - Exchange 2003 support, MMS and other messaging enhancements.
•Voice - Improved calling experience.
•Media - media scanning time improvements.
Note:
This firmware update is not intended to resolve all device reset or freezing issues, which may be caused by:
•Corrupted files
•Device memory becoming filled and leaving insufficient room to run applications.
•Use of incompatible 3rd party applications on the Samsung Captivate.

There's some stuff not listed:
1) If you're rooted and the update actually works, it will remove root access, which isn't a big deal as you can re-apply it.
2) GPS is supposedly massively improved.
3) New Youtube widget with thumbnail previews (on the actual widget)
4) Nearly everyone successful at updating is reporting greatly improved battery life.
5) LbsTestMode will no longer be accessible through the usual code.
6) Removes PC Internet from USB options (a.k.a. tethering).

Most people agree that this update is not exactly the same as the JH7 leaked ROM from a while back.

I haven't had any success updating either, even after removing root. I'm going to try re-flashing my phone back to complete stock soon. I wouldn't bother since it's a minor update and I'm going to reflash to stock for Froyo updating (whenever Samsung gets off their lazy ass for that...), but the greatly improved battery life is very enticing. My battery life has tanked since I went widget crazy.

 

[SixtyWattMan]

I straight up flashed a JH7 rom someone posted. i haven't tested my GPS yet and I still need to re-root activate sideloading blah blah blah. The GPS results are pretty negative though. Samsung is probably not going to be able to fix the GPS issues.

 

[TechBoy]

is it really that bad? I was considering selling my iPhone 4 and getting the captivate plus some $ in the process but all these problems are just as bad if not worse than the iPhone 4's.

 

[Neurofreeze]

I straight up flashed a JH7 rom someone posted. i haven't tested my GPS yet and I still need to re-root activate sideloading blah blah blah. The GPS results are pretty negative though. Samsung is probably not going to be able to fix the GPS issues.

Many people are reporting very good results from the actual OTA update. Like I mentioned earlier, the JH7 ROM (the ~150MB one) does not seem to be the same as the OTA update, hence why I've been trying to do a straight up upgrade.

is it really that bad? I was considering selling my iPhone 4 and getting the captivate plus some $ in the process but all these problems are just as bad if not worse than the iPhone 4's.

Is what really that bad? The phone, at stock, is fine aside from the GPS issue. The updating issues are for people who heavily modded their phone.

As far as I've read, anyone who has a stock phone aside from whatever apps installed or preferences changed has had no trouble with the update, unless they were stupid enough to interrupt the process.

Also: I tried removing both root and ext2 lagfix and updating, didn't work. At this point it'd probably save me time just to flash to stock JH6.

 

[Neurofreeze]

I think the update may have more or less worked for me.

From what I'm seeing, I speculate that most of the "failed to update" messages for us that heavily modded our phones are running into problems because we removed some AT&T bloatware that the update is attempting to patch. The rest of the update seems like it's being applied.

My accuracy with GPS is now 10m and I got a lock on 10 satellites within just a few seconds. I don't have any place to drive to today though so a real test will have to wait. For a point of reference, my GPS was decent at locking on prior with some tweaking however actually driving with it was very hit and miss (some days it worked just fine, others... not so much), although I never got above seven satellite lock before and my accuracy was usually 30m.

 

[SixtyWattMan]

Many people are reporting very good results from the actual OTA update. Like I mentioned earlier, the JH7 ROM (the ~150MB one) does not seem to be the same as the OTA update, hence why I've been trying to do a straight up upgrade.

Maybe I'll try flashing back to stock and updating. I'm not that concerned as I never use GPS, just more pissed that I paid for the phone to do something and it doesn't.

 

[Neurofreeze]

Maybe I'll try flashing back to stock and updating. I'm not that concerned as I never use GPS, just more pissed that I paid for the phone to do something and it doesn't.

Same here. Likewise how AT&T kindly disabled HSUPA and the FM tuner in our Captivates (the first for no discernible reason other than to make sure it was inferior to the iPhone4's upload speed, the second simply because they wanted us to use their shitty non-free radio service).

 

[TechBoy]

What I meant is how many damn fixes do I have to apply to get all the functions to work? I don't want to go from a phone plagued with problems to another with equally or worse number or problems.

 

[Neurofreeze]

Your question is still somewhat vague. What do you mean by functions? If you mean all functions you have on your current iPhone (aside from facetime), then you have to apply exactly zero fixes.

The OTA update will update flawlessly on a stock phone (if JH7 doesn't come with the phone already since you would be a new buyer), and that supposedly improves the GPS thing (we'll see in time).

All other functionality of the phone works as advertised.

There are some not-apparent things that some of us like to tweak. For instance I wanted to replace the battery iron on my status bar, which required root. Yes, that's another tweak, however that is completely impossible on an iPhone.

The FM tuner on Galaxy S devices is disabled by AT&T on the captivate, some people are working on enabling it. This is another "fix" however this functionality isn't advertised as present on the Captivate nor is the hardware even present at all on an iPhone 4.

Basically the Captivate is kind of like a Phenom X3. You get it, put it into the socket, and it works. However some more adventurous enthusiasts may want to try overclocking it or even going so far as trying to enable the fourth core (if that were possible; I wouldn't know, never looked into it). Saying the a Mac would be less trouble is misleading. A non-modded/overclocked custom computer could be just as trouble free as a Mac, however with the custom computer you could at least have the option of modding/overclocking/etc, whereas you're stuck with the Mac how it is.

Likewise the Captivate will work just fine as will the iPhone 4. However if you want to overclock the CPU or enable hidden hardware features, yes, you could run into trouble, however you simply don't have those options on the iPhone 4, period.

 

[TechBoy]

Your question is still somewhat vague. What do you mean by functions? If you mean all functions you have on your current iPhone (aside from facetime), then you have to apply exactly zero fixes.

The OTA update will update flawlessly on a stock phone (if JH7 doesn't come with the phone already since you would be a new buyer), and that supposedly improves the GPS thing (we'll see in time).

All other functionality of the phone works as advertised.

There are some not-apparent things that some of us like to tweak. For instance I wanted to replace the battery iron on my status bar, which required root. Yes, that's another tweak, however that is completely impossible on an iPhone.

The FM tuner on Galaxy S devices is disabled by AT&T on the captivate, some people are working on enabling it. This is another "fix" however this functionality isn't advertised as present on the Captivate nor is the hardware even present at all on an iPhone 4.

Basically the Captivate is kind of like a Phenom X3. You get it, put it into the socket, and it works. However some more adventurous enthusiasts may want to try overclocking it or even going so far as trying to enable the fourth core (if that were possible; I wouldn't know, never looked into it). Saying the a Mac would be less trouble is misleading. A non-modded/overclocked custom computer could be just as trouble free as a Mac, however with the custom computer you could at least have the option of modding/overclocking/etc, whereas you're stuck with the Mac how it is.

Likewise the Captivate will work just fine as will the iPhone 4. However if you want to overclock the CPU or enable hidden hardware features, yes, you could run into trouble, however you simply don't have those options on the iPhone 4, period.

So GPS, whatever Lag issues it has is fixed? I dont have to do anything extra other than the stock updates to get it?

 

[Neurofreeze]

The lag issue from the original stock ROM wasn't that big of a deal. Actually most of it could be dealt with by just not using the shitty Daily Updates Widget that comes standard. However the UI is supposedly more responsive now with the JH7 firmware, but I wouldn't know since I use Launcher Pro instead of Samsung's TouchWiz, so even without the lagfix or firmware update I wouldn't have noticed the lag anyway.

The lagfix basically just moves apps and app data onto the internal storage instead of the internal SD card. The actual "lag" really wasn't caused by this since most smartphones in existence run apps off of an internal SD card, it was far more to due with TouchWiz and the Daily Updates widget being not so speedy. The lagfix circumvents this by speeding up access to data.

Basically it's like having an inefficient program accessing your 7200rpm hard drive, and instead of making the program be more efficient, you just switch to an SSD.

Regardless, crazy people still on stock TouchWiz report that the phone is overall more responsive with the OTA update. I haven't really noticed any more responsiveness after re-applying the lagfix after I updated either (but again, I'm using Launcher Pro, not TouchWiz). I do still get massively better benchmarks though.

GPS, like I said, is still up for debate but early reports indicate that it is working much better. It has the same GPS chip as the Epic, and all reviews of the Epic seem to really like their GPS, so I'm hoping this update will make ours perform similarly. The Captivate (and I believe all US Galaxy S models) has a BCM4751 chip in it for GPS, which is supposed to be superior to the BCM20751 on the international Galaxy S (i9000). I'll post more later when I go driving some place. I know some spots where AT&T cell reception wasn't too hot and my GPS went all kinds of shit. I'll go there again sometime this weekend.

If you're unsure, you still have 30 days to try out pretty much any smartphone. If you don't like the Captivate in those 30 days, just return it. The iPhone 4 is a fine phone.

 

[Peanut Butter]

Update never actually worked for me. Ended up reflashing back to stock using Odin's One Click Restore to JF6. Rooted that to get ROM Manager on there, then used Clockwork Recovery to flash Cognition 2.1 found here.

Everything's been running perfectly so far. Touchwiz actually seems a bit less laggy even after putting all my icons/widgets on there. Media scanning seems snappier as well as it used to take ages for it to finish reading my 16gb microsd, now it takes maybe a minute if not less. Testing out the GPS using GPS Test as well as the Lbstestmode (LauncherPro Activity shortcut) and initially it was still pretty bad; it was only able to find one satellite and never locked onto it. Went into the applications settings to change it from Standalone to MS Based. Then in the SUPL settings, changed the server (or whatever it's called; going off the top of my head) to supl.google.com, the port to 7276, and Secure socket off (not sure why I switched this, I think it may have helped a bit in my old settings). Went back to GPS test and found 8-9 satellites within 4-5 seconds and locked onto all of them a second after.

 

[maverick777]

The lag issue from the original stock ROM wasn't that big of a deal. Actually most of it could be dealt with by just not using the shitty Daily Updates Widget that comes standard. However the UI is supposedly more responsive now with the JH7 firmware, but I wouldn't know since I use Launcher Pro instead of Samsung's TouchWiz, so even without the lagfix or firmware update I wouldn't have noticed the lag anyway.

The lagfix basically just moves apps and app data onto the internal storage instead of the internal SD card. The actual "lag" really wasn't caused by this since most smartphones in existence run apps off of an internal SD card, it was far more to due with TouchWiz and the Daily Updates widget being not so speedy. The lagfix circumvents this by speeding up access to data.

Basically it's like having an inefficient program accessing your 7200rpm hard drive, and instead of making the program be more efficient, you just switch to an SSD.

Regardless, crazy people still on stock TouchWiz report that the phone is overall more responsive with the OTA update. I haven't really noticed any more responsiveness after re-applying the lagfix after I updated either (but again, I'm using Launcher Pro, not TouchWiz). I do still get massively better benchmarks though.

This is not entirely accurate. I'm not a technical person by any means, but I'll explain it the way I understand it.

The reason why these phones lag is because Samsung chose to use a propriety file system. Instead of using Ext2/3/4 (normal Linux partitions), they created their own file system which is Fat 32 plus journaling. The journaling prevents corruption similar to what a linux EXT 4 partion would do.

What most of the lag fixes out there do is create a Ext 2/3/4 partition either on the internal card or external microSD card and uses it as a buffer. If changes meet certain criteria that the hackers have programed into the lag fix the changes are written to the internal card. This prevents the file system from unecessarily bogging itself down because of the journalling system. The drawback is if you use an Ext2/3 partition as the buffer as part of the lag fix, the file system is more prone to corruption.

There is a Voodoo lag fix available that is more of a permanent solution. Rather than creating a buffer, it completely replaces the RFS file system with an EXT4 file system on the internal memory card. I have it on my Vibrant and can tell you from experience that the phone is MUCH more responsive even though the Quadrant Advance scores are lower than those using an Ext2 lag fix.

The lag on the stock rom is fairly significant and apparent on a few programs. Examples:

Market - when installing programs, the search feature would freeze or stutter if you continue to browse while the program is being downloaded and installed. With the lag fix, there is no such lag.

Aldiko - when opening a book you've previously been reading, on the stock rom it would take a few seconds (5+) for the book to reopen. With the lag fix, it takes less than a second. Not instant, but close enough.

Touchdown Exchange - on stock, when opening your inbox, the phone would lag on the black screen to load for a few seconds. With the lag fix it's nearly instant. Same will all other touchdown tabs. Tasks, calendar, contacts.

Those are the 3 major ones for me since I use them a lot everyday.

 

[Neurofreeze]

Some people are reporting that Samsung level 2 support guys are saying that the JH7 does NOT containing the "real" GPS fix (which is in direct opposition to what other AT&T and Samsung support people are claiming), which is supposedly going Over-The-Air before the end of the month (hopefully those reps realize that the end of the month is in one week).

Yay for Samsung software support. You'd think Samsung would've figured out from their past phones that their software support is completely unacceptable.

It sounds kind of weird that there would be two OTA minor fixes then a big OTA patch (2.2 supposedly... again) the following month. Sounds like a giant logistical mess. Also many people in XDA are still convinced that the current OTA update did do something, like I have said I have never gotten test readings this good before, not even close. However it could be something they changed on their end.

The improved battery life some believe is due to the changes in brightness options. The lowest setting is even lower and the dynamic brightness setting seems to be a little more on the dark side (although its current behavior is like a poor man's dynamic contrast, and I hate dynamic contrast). I thought the original settings were a tad on the bright side. I'm still undecided on the new automatic brightness though.