So you’ve got a Poly VVX 250 Obi Edition phone, and it’s running firmware 6.3.0.1 or similar, which is badly out of date and not friendly. You expect to simply plug it in, add it’s MAC address to Google Voice and be off to the races when you discover that Google only supports version 6.4.0.2 or higher. Well crud. Now it’s time to update the firmware. You read old articles and forum posts from 2019 when the phones first officially became supported and they don’t work.

Next, you try to go to Poly’s website for support, and every time you try to select the product, you get redirected to HP, which then puts you through a product selector and that ultimately leads you to a lovely error message.

Thanks HP, for ruining yet another product… Support says they have to escalate your case to a senior engineer, which sounds nearly hopeless.

Solution

After reading dozens of articles and trying any number of things, I was able to finally solve the problem by… REMOVING the s from https in the FirmwareUpdate URL

For example, if the download link you are trying to apply to the FirmwareURL update is https://downloads.polycom.com/voice/obi/6-4-3-1/3111-48820-001.sip.ld,bgu-conv=disable, you have to modify it to be

http://downloads.polycom.com/voice/obi/6-4-3-1/3111-48820-001.sip.ld,bgu-conv=disable

Yes, truly, it was that stupid. Every URL I had tried up to that point had failed. Make that change and *POOF* suddenly your phone is updating firmware, then rebooting, no joke, at least 10 times, and *BAM* your phone is updated to the latest firmware that Google supports, all by itself.

This should work on the following

  • Poly VVX 150 Obi Edition Phone
  • Poly VVX 250 Obi Edition Phone
  • Poly VVX 350 Obi Edition Phone
  • Poly VVX 450 Obi Edition Phone

Please shoot me a comment or email if you too found this solution to be the ONLY one that works, because sheesh, it took me forever to figure it out!