How to get rid of the bloody Chinese pages when starting browsing the Internet?

Can you help me debug the unreliable internet connectivity on my Android Samsung Galaxy S1?

• Can you help me debug the unreliable internet connectivity on my Android Samsung Galaxy S1? I am becoming bored of the unreliable nature of the internet connectivity I'm getting from my Samsung Galaxy S1. It's often intermittent, for no obvious reason. This occurs either directly on the phone itself (browsing, email, etc) or when I use it as a wifi access point with my laptop. For background info.... my carrier is O2 and I'm in the UK. When I check with O2, they usually tell me there are no outages when I'm having problems. The 3G/GPRS/etc indicator on my phone sometimes shows traffic (the little red and green arrows light up) and sometimes zero traffic, even if I'm actively trying to use the connection. The signal indicator typically shows a strong signal, but no web pages load, and other services (email etc) fail to sync. As I write this, my laptop reports a strong wifi connection to the phone, and the phone reports good coverage. And yet web pages are timing out, both on my laptop and on my phone. Disabling/re-enabling data mode and flight mode occasionally fixes things, but temporarily. Rebooting the phone ditto. Obviously this is a tremendously irritating workaround. This seems to have become more of an issue since upgrading the phone OS a couple of months ago -- this phone/provider/laptop combo has certainly given me way more reliable internet access in the past. As well as trawling all the usual forums, I'd like to be able to debug this myself. Where do I start? Presumably there are debugging tools that would help me work out what's going on. Does anyone have any recommendations? Free apps only. Would rooting my phone be a good step e.g. allowing me to access otherwise-hidden log files? I'm running stock Android 2.3.3, build GINGERBREAD.XWJVH, on a Samsung GT-I9000, Galaxy S1. I'm using Zeam launcher on the phone, the laptop is Windows 7 Home Premium, 64 bit. I'd simply like to know how to start debugging these issues. I appreciate that a good debugging approach might be to start with a factory reset, but I'd prefer to avoid that if possible. I'm happy tooling around with Linux, so... where do I start? I suspect I should root the phone and try some sort of logcat; does that sound right? What next? (Cygwin will probably get installed on my laptop at some point!) Many thanks one and all.

• Answer:

  I have a Galaxy Tab 7" that runs Froyo or maybe Gingerbread and I have the connectivity issues you describe. (I use it infrequently enough that I don't care that much about it.) I have a Samsung Galaxy S1, but it runs Ice Cream Sandwich. I never ever have connectivity problems. So...my suggestion is you should spend your efforts on upgrading Android to Ice Cream Sandwich.