My Verizon Droid DNA keeps surprising me. One morning about a month ago I got wakened by sound announcing the arrival of an Amber Alert.

And just now my phone startled me with a different audio alert. I looked at its screen, and it turns out that Verizon just rolled out a firmware update. Took about ten minutes to download and install, but I admit I was nervous. If something had gone wrong, it would become a brick.

I keep it near me nearly all the time. It's in my pocket during the day and it sits on my bed next to my pillow at night. It's there just in case I have another stroke, or if I'm walking around and lose my balance and fall, so that I have a way of summoning help. And it does lend me a bit of comfort because of that, but if it got bricked it wouldn't be there for me any more.

I am mostly pretty happy with it, but I do have one significant complaint: if it loses service it never spontaneously reconnects. I have to reboot it. I hope that was fixed with this firmware update.

My experience, oddly, is that I have that problem on Friday afternoons nearly every week, and only rarely any other time. I live about a quarter of a mile from a major highway (Oregon 217) and I imagine it's the result of "cell breathing".

UPDATE: That Wikipedia article about cell breathing makes it sound like something that's done deliberately. That's not the case. It is, rather, an emergent result of the way that CDMA handles power control. Ideally if you lose connection because your cell shrunk, you're supposed to do an idle handoff to a neighboring cell, but I think that isn't working for me.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at 09:43 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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