How-To get an unlocked Samsung Galaxy S to work with Fido

I got my wife an unlocked Samsung Galaxy S (the "Captivate" variety) and had a few challenges getting it set up.

Configuring the Fido APN

There are at least two ways to configure the Fido APN although you find even more configurations if you search online. I ended up getting the Fido APN settings from Rogers directly. The instructions were for the Nexus One, but it doesn't matter to Rogers/Fido what device you are using, all Smartphones look alike to the carrier as far as I can tell.

Here they are as they appear on my phone:

Fido Access Point Settings (Settings->Wireless and network->Mobile networks->Access Point Names)

• Name: fido
• APN: fido-core-appl1.apn
• Proxy: <Not Set>
• Port: <Not Set>
• Username: <Not Set>
• Password: <Not Set>
• Server: <Not Set>
• MMSC: http://mms.fido.ca
• MMS Proxy: 205.151.11.13
• MMS Port: 80
• MCC: 302 (retrieved from SIM)
• MNC: 370 (retrieved from SIM)
• Authentication type: <Not Set>
• APN type: internet + mms

The tricky part was that I had to enable "Data roaming" (under Settings->Wireless and network->Mobile networks->Data roaming) for this to work (finally found this out thanks to this thread about Fido network issues. The reason is that Fido phones are actually roaming on the Rogers network (or maybe it's what used to be Fido's network before they were acquired). It's roaming for free, but it's still technically-speaking roaming so without enabling this option the APN settings above won't work. There are other configurations online that use the fido.internet.ca APN, however, the fido-core-appl1.apn one is what you should use if you have/ a smartphone as supposedly it is faster.

You can confirm if you device is roaming by going to "Settings->About phone->Status->Roaming".

Incoming text messages timestamp bug

Incoming texts will appear to have been sent four hours ago (if you and the sender are in Pacific Standard Time). This has something to do with Android applying a timezone adjustment again, even though the message has already been adjusted by the provider before it arrives at the phone. Thanks to this thread about this timestamp bug, I was able to fix the problem by setting the Date/Time to "manual" rather than "automatic", changing my timezone to GMT-3 (Greenland) and then changing the time to be what the actual local time was. This works because GMT-3 is 4 hours ahead of PST-7 which cancels out the 4 hours that Android is subtracing from every message that comes in. The problem with this is that if you sync with Google Calendar, all the event times will be screwed up. I have since set the time back to "automatic" and I am hoping that the Froyo 2.2 update fixes this problem.

Update (2010/12/28): Thanks to this thread about SMS time differences I was able to find this app called SMS Time Fix. It works perfectly.

Updating to ECLAIR.UCJH7 (AKA JH7)

After updating the firmware to JH7 (a minor update to Android 2.1) with Kies, I could no longer connect to Kies. I tried everything imaginable, but the only thing that worked was to factory reset the device.

Constant reboots

I installed an app called Quick Profiles which caused the device to do what I would describe as a "soft reboot" (the screen goes black for a few seconds, and it returns to the locked-out screen, but all the services restart, like the wallpaper and the media scanner, so it's as if the desktop and all of its applications crashed. The only way I was able to fix this was by doing a factory reset. In the future we will back up all the settings and apps before installing a new app, then we can do a factory reset and then restore if anything goes wrong.

Update (2010/12/28): Installed MyBackup Pro and scheduled nightly backups to the SD card and online. Seems to be working like a charm so far, although I haven't actually tested the backups by doing a restore.