Shiver, fear. I bought my phone in December of 2012. That was just after I got home from the rehab after my stroke. I didn't have any use for a cellphone before that, but it's a good solution for the "I've fallen and I can't get up" problem.

Those ads back in the day may have come across as funny to the fully-abled, but it's a scary possibility for someone who is crippled. It hasn't ever happened to me; I'm proud to say that even with all the difficulty I have now moving around I haven't lost my balance and fallen even once. But it's been a comfort to carry this phone around just in case.

Well, my 2 year contract with Verizon ended last December, and they've started sending me messages telling me that I'm now entitled (was that the word they used?) to buy a new phone from them, and just incidentally sign another 2 year contract but they didn't say that part.

I'm not interested. This phone (an HTC Droid DNA, which is Verizon's custom version of the HTC Butterfly) works just fine for me.

Verizon hasn't sold this phone for quite a while. But it's a pleasant surprise that they're still supporting it. Today I got a message telling me there was a firmware update available.

Those are always scary. Windows Update killed my ACER NAS a few months ago, for instance. It hung in the middle of updating, and now it won't boot.

So just before beginning to type this post, I nervously let the phone start updating. It just finished and doesn't seem to have become a brick, so whew!

UPDATE: Looks like it was a security update. I do remember reading recently about a couple of new pretty-bad security holes in Android, and that's probably what this is about.

It's not a huge surprise that they're rolling it out gradually, because a lot of people have to download OTA. If a huge number of people did that at once, it could overload their network.

I had to. I used to be able to use Wifi with my phone. My Fire HD still works with my wifi, but one day suddenly my phone couldn't connect to it. It's not like anything changed in my hub or anything, it just stopped working.

I've never figured out why. Partly that's because it isn't a big deal; I don't use my phone to browse the web. But all the previous updates came to me across wifi; this one came across Verizon's network. Presumably they won't charge me for the data, but it wouldn't matter even if they did since I don't use Verizon data for anything else.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at 03:09 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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