The Upgrade

So, now we're ready to proceed with the upgrade procedure itself. Connect your phone to your PC via a USB cable, make sure the battery is charged up and you're pretty much set to go. Double-click the firmware upgrade and once it's loaded, hit next. This will put the phone into service mode where it will then extract the files and prepare itself for the firmware upgrade. Depending on how big the upgrade is (as the files will vary in size depending on the manufacturer and what software they supply) this part can take different amounts of time.

Don't worry if the screen on your device looks strange, the HTC devices will have a red, green, blue and grey bar across the screen alongside with some text. This is perfectly normal. After a little while you should see a screen similar to the one below if you've got a HTC device, it might differ for other manufacturers' devices. Again, click next to proceed.

Now, there might be a list of things that you need to check before you continue, although we've covered most of the important ones already. Again, this will differ between various manufacturers. After clicking next here, you have to wait a little while again while the software upgrade checks that your phone is using the right language and so forth, as you can't cross install language versions. This might be bad news for those that wanted to install their own local language files, but if you have a look around online, you'll find ways about how this can be done.

Finally you're ready to proceed with the update by oddly enough pressing the Update button. You'll of course have to press next one more time, just to make sure you're sure that you really want to proceed with the upgrade.

If you own a HTC device you'll also get a dialogue box that tells you what will happen during the installation procedure, have a quick read and press next to continue. This is when the scary part starts, as this is when the upgrade process actually initiates. You'll get a progress bar on your PC as well as on the device. It should take about 10 minutes on a reasonably fast computer, although this does again come down to how many extra applications, pictures, video and audio files the manufacturer supplies for the device.

Once the upgrade process has finished, your phone will reboot and you're greeted by a pristine device in all its glory running Windows Mobile 6. From here on you have to set it up as you would with a new device and enter all the various settings you want it to use. We can't offer any screenshots here, as it's like doing a hard reset on the device, so any software would've been wiped off. Once you've gone through the basic setup, the device will load up any custom settings and applications from your device manufacturer.