[Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 Edition) General] Elim:
Responsibility

I am not responsible for your bricked devices, dead ad-card or anything else you did because of this guide. It is up to you, to read this guide carefully and to inform you also on other places, so that you know what you are doing and what are the risks.

If you have fear to brick your Note then better wait and take your time. The official OTA update will also came in some days.

If something goes wrong then don't hesitate and post it here. I - and surly others - will try to help you.

Upgrade

I didn't want to wait for the next OTA update to MK1 (which include user management and other improvements). So, I start to update manually and because I didn't find clearly answers here in the forum, I make afterwards this guide.

This guide should work for all different kind of 10.1 Notes Edition 2014 (WiFi only, GSM, LTE) so long you download the corresponding, correct firmware for your Note version. I did it for a P600 (WiFi only) and it works without any issues.

Results

Updated to newest firmware (MK1)

Normally you don't lose your data and configuration just as by a OTA update. But make however a backup of everything for the case something goes wrong and you have to made a factory reset!

Still everything is working what I use. I didn't and can't test everything and maybe something is not longer working because of the region switch.

The warranty bit is still 0 (after the update):

Preparation

First we need the firmware, we want to flash to our Note. I got mine from here: Sammobile but you can get it also from here: Samsungis.

You can find a list of all firmwares for your Note model by searching. In the list I choose the newest one for the MK1 update also it is for a different region. Until now I didn't see any issues because of this region switch.

Issue is maybe that you can't download here the firmware because both sides use hotfile for file hosting. Here you can use the pCloud service. I did it and from there I could download the file.

Next we need some tools: Odin (I use version 3.09) and maybe a Samsung usb driver (I got mine because of an earlier installed Kies). There are many places where you can find Odin but I got mine from here: Odin 3.09 (xda).

If you don't have a Windows computer in your reach then there are also tools for MacOS and Linux but I didn't test any of them!

A Samsung USB driver which by example is installed when you install the Kies application from Samsung.

Upgrading

There are many good tutorials for using the Odin application. Therefore I will only describe in a nutshell what I did. When you search for a more detailed guide then you can use one of them: Samsungsi: Using Odin, rootSU (xda): Odin flash guide. They also exists in other languages, you are free to use a search tool.

Start Odin as administrator

Connect the Note via USB too the computer and check that Odin got a connection: One of the ID:COM fields should contain the port number and also the background should be blue (or yellow if you use an older Odin version).

Press the AP (PDA in older versions) button to add the downloaded firmware (tar.md5). In the message box you should see (depending from your Odin version):

...
<OSM> Please wait...
<OSM> (*) is valid
<OSM> Checking MD5 finishes Successfully...
<OSM> Leave CS..

(*) the filename of your firmware download.

Power-off the Note and wait for 1 minute (I didn't understand this step but found it in some guides)

Hold the power and volume down button pressed until you see the triangle screen.

Press the volume up button to go to the download mode (Odin mode):

New press the Start button in Odin and wait until flash is down. Be very carefully here!

And no, I don't have any photos to show what happens now. Look into other more detailed Odin guides.

At the end the Note reboot by his own and the update is done :laugh:

When something goes wrong then look in the tutorials, how to solve it.

Downgrade

A downgrade works in the same way with Odin. So, you can download an older firmware and flash it in the same way with Odin.

You can here also use Kies to recover an old firmware and Kies download the correct version for you. I try this with the current Kies version 3 for Windows and MacOS and with both it works.

Special thanks to

xda for his great community

Sammobile for the firmware

beanstown106, bigbiff, nrage23 and many others here in the forum for their knowledge and help

lap777 for correction on this guide

rootSU for his Odin guide