what is fota? Firmware over the air?

[ninjabear]

What is it?


I don't realy understand what it means by firmware over the air?

Allowing you to update firmware over the air?

Hmm I don't see anything in the air..

Any ideas?

[Crumbles]

I think the idea was to provide service providers (ie - Cingular) to offer firmware over their network. So, one day you could boot up your phone and it would go:

"New firmware available, do you want to update! yes/no"

However, I have yet to see any service provider offer this as they don't care.

[im92109210]

it has to be much more complicated than that guys I think. Each firmware is huge, my N95's was ~120MB series 40's are around 60~70MB if I am not mistaken (I forgot the last time I upgraded a Series 40) Not everyone have unlimited data packages at this time too... anyways, it would take alot of time and money to download over the air, dont forget storage space + We are not even sure the current firmwares can install firmwares themselves. I mean now, the PC suite installs the new firmware but is the phone capable to upgrade itself without a computer?

And another point, safety! What if it crashes in the middle of the update? or if some packet doesnt get downloaded to the phone! If it dies in the middle you are in trouble. I believe its still risky (Even PC Suite upgrades fail at times) but anything can be possible ;)

I believe once these points are solved, It should be as simple as Crumbles suggests :p

[carcomptoy]

I think the idea was to provide service providers (ie - Cingular) to offer firmware over their network. So, one day you could boot up your phone and it would go:

"New firmware available, do you want to update! yes/no"

However, I have yet to see any service provider offer this as they don't care.
I see even the dumb Sprint phones have an option of upgrading the software, although I have yet to try on someone's who actually is paying for [Power]Vision services so it'll work.

[Crumbles]

Each firmware is huge, my N95's was ~120MB series 40's are around 60~70MB if I am not mistaken (I forgot the last time I upgraded a Series 40) Not everyone have unlimited data packages at this time too...Which would be why you wouldn't want to do it over the air and use your PC instead. Probably another reason FToA never took off.

...What if it crashes in the middle of the update? or if some packet doesnt get downloaded to the phone! If it dies in the middle you are in trouble. I believe its still risky (Even PC Suite upgrades fail at times) but anything can be possible ;)pWhat does the phone crashing have to do with anything? I think you guys don't understand how these firmware updates work.

Your phone downloads the entire update to a sand boxed part of the phone.
Once complete, it performs a checksum on the firmware update.
If the checksum passes, the flash proceeds.

Therefore, if a "packet" didn't get downloaded, or if the phone crashed while it was downloading the update, nothing would happen. The phone would reboot, and it'd be back to the way it was.

If the phone were to crash during the flash you'd be in trouble. But that has nothing to do whether or not you download over the air, or by PC. That just has to do with your phone crashing or not.