What to do?

With my daughter entering middle school I thought she was old enough and responsible enough to have a cell phone. Obviously being the daughter of an Information Technology professional (me) she wanted a smartphone with all the bells and whistles having seen and used mom’s and dad’s Motorola Droid 3 quite often.

Thankfully I still had my old original Motorola Droid that I had purchased when I moved from AT&T Wireless (formerly Cingular Wireless) to Verizon Wireless back in December of 2009. I rooted the smartphone and decided to install Peter Alfonso’s Bugless Beast GPA19 custom ROM which is based on Gingerbread. It’s supposedly a very stable release and has quite a few upgrades over the stock Verizon ROM.

Which cell carrier to use?

Now that I had a phone I had to figure out which carrier to use. Since I already had a phone I had to stick with carriers that support CDMA as opposed to GSM. As I previously alluded to I already had a Verizon Wireless Family Plan for my wife and myself but Verizon won’t allow you to add a smartphone to any plan unless you purchase a data plan. I could change my grandfathered unlimited data plan to a Share Everything plan but the current data caps are really harsh for power users such as myself and my wife (Facebook). What other options did I have, what about the prepaid carriers?

I literally stumbled across Page Plus Cellular while doing some research. Page Plus Cellular actually utilizes Verizon Wireless’s cellular network so I immediately knew that my Motorola Droid would work without any issues. And that the signal coverage was excellent – in my area. While doing some background research on Page Plus I stumbled across Kitty Wireless, an authorized reseller for Page Plus Cellular. I posted a query to Twitter and received the following response;

Well I took them up on their offer… I activated my old Motorola Droid online via Kitty Wireless, I purchased a $10 PIN and I was off and running. The whole process took less than 30 minutes although there were quite a few things that needed to be accomplished as a first time customer of Kitty Wireless. I had no issues following the instructions (there’s a brilliant idea) and was up and running in no time.

Parental Controls / Monitoring

Now the question that almost every parent struggles with… should I and how can I effectively monitor my child’s cell phone (and Internet) activity? This topic really deserves a post by itself but I’m not sure that I have anything earth breaking to offer on the subject. I will probably do something for at least for the first few years especially since I have daughters. I see that “My Mobile Watchdog” seems quite popular so I’ll probably try that out first – can’t seem to find out how it’s monitoring (reporting) will work when the smartphone has data disabled and will need to rely only on WiFi for Internet access.

I came across this advertising image from IG Parental Control which is a definite attention getter.

I think every parent will need to decide for themselves what do-to and how far to take it. I think we’d all like to believe that our children are saints but there are definitely some that need a stronger hand than others to help them stay on course. There are literally dozens if not hundreds of apps out there that claim to provide filtering and monitoring.

Anyone have any recommendations?

Google Family Safety Center
Microsoft Family Internet Safety

Cheers!

It was ironic because once I made it past the triage nurse the physician’s assistant, who was very nice, she took a quick look at me for a few minutes and said Lyme disease. She asked me if I had any spots and asked me to stand up at which point she found a red blotch on my back at my waistline that she felt was probably the originating spot. The physician’s assistant explained that she had diagnosed more than 30-40 cases in the past month and later we started to hear about all our friends and neighbors that had recently been infected and diagnosed.

Ultimately, the physician assistant’s diagnosis was confirmed with positive blood test 3 days after my visit to the hospital and by then the antibiotics I was taking were starting to kick in. It would take me almost an entire 2 months to get my strength and stamina back to where it was before I got sick.

While laid up in bed I quickly grew tiered of managing the heavy laptop and the smartphone display was too small so the wife went out and purchased a Motorola Xoom for me. I’ll admit that I had put the bug in her ear about it (Thanks Kim!)

Motorola Xoom

I’ve had the Motorola Xoom for about 3 months now and I’ve been very impressed with both the hardware and software. I just recently finished reading my first eBook, Web Operations:Keeping the Data On Time written by John Allspaw and Jesse Robbins via Google Books. Not much unlike my Motorola Droid 3 (Google Android 2.3) the Motorola Xoom (Google Android 3.1) does a great job of managing all my personal and work contacts including my email and calendar. It’s very fast and responsive and the ability to view Adobe Flash content is a big key to using the device to view almost any website.

What tablet are you using and what for?

Cheers!

I was able to “root” my original Motorola Droid which was running 2.2.2 by using SuperOneClick written by CLShortFuse. Then I stumbled across Peter Alfonso’s port of Gingerbread 2.3.5. I was able to use ROM Manager along with ClockworkMod Recovery to install the custom ROM and I had my old Motorola Droid running Gingerbread 2.3.5 in a very short time.

Anyone have any recommended or favorite Android ROM for a Motorola Droid?

Cheers!

I had two devices with which to test, an original Motorola Droid (Verizon Wireless) running Android 2.2.2 and a Motorola Xoom (Wi-Fi Only) running Android 3.1. The SSL certificate installed on the pair of MPX 7500s was purchased from VeriSign and issued from an intermediate certificate authority – “VeriSign Class 3 International Server CA – G3” (February 2010) which was in turn issued by “VeriSign Class 3 Public Primary Certification Authority – G5” (November 2006). I’m was guessing that the November 2006 certificate is probably part of the base Android operating system but the February 2010 is probably missing. Unfortunately there’s no way to actual view the installed root certificates on either device? What’s up with that?

There are some well documented issues here and here with Google’s Android around the inability of the operating system to import private or additional root and intermediate certificates. It appears that you can import additional root certificates for VPN and wireless authentication but not for web based SSL or email authentication. That’s essentially what I found on both the Motorola Droid and Motorola Xoom, however, a friend showed me a Motorola Blur running Android 2.2.1 today that actually allows you to import additional root and intermediate certificates and it appeared to work for both web browser SSL sessions as well as the Citrix receiver. Is this an add-on feature by Motorola that’s not included in the base operating system? Is there anyone reading this that can enlighten me?

In the end I discovered that the certificate installed into the NetScaler wasn’t chained properly to the VeriSign intermediate certificate. SSL Shopper has a great tool to check the certificate chaining. And thanks to this post from Jason I was able to configure the NetScaler properly and now both the Motorola Droid and Xoom can make an SSL connection without any certificate warnings.

Cheers!

I had done my research and was very eager to stay away from any Windows Mobile device, deciding instead to embrace Google’s Android operating system.  In the weeks leading up to my decision I was flip-flopping back and forth between a Smartphone and a Netbook. I also had to keep the wife in mind… no purchases would be authorized without her buy-in. Thankfully the wife had been looking to ‘upgrade’ for sometime, looking for a more efficient way to organize and carry her address book and calendar. It was the Motorola Droid for myself and a HTC Eris for the wife.

That was about 2 weeks ago now and I’m here to report my experiences. Overall both myself and the wife are extremely satisfied with our purchase and with the quality of Verizon’s network. While the wife was already a big fan of Facebook and social networking the HTC Eris has really brought her into the Web 2.0 world. We did have some challenges uploading her Microsoft Outlook Calendar and Contacts into Google so we could sync them up with the phone.  Other than that one issue she’s really embracing the technology and using it to improve her daily life and activities. She lives by the calendar and activities list that are now loaded onto the phone.

As for myself I’m also getting into the Web 2.0 world. While I’m on Facebook I’m not very active although I am taking a liking to Twitter and really enjoying the Seesmic Android client. I will comment on the slide out QWERTY keyboard; for a guy who is 6′ 5″  the keys are just way to small for my large hands. The on screen touch keyboard is really the only usable option for me personally. The battery life of both phones has been pretty decent although I did install Advanced Task Killer from the Android Market on both phones.

Of course as Moore’s Law goes, Google released their Nexus One only two weeks after my purchase of the Motorola Droid. I have yet to feel any buyers remorse because I’m pretty happy with my purchase. Hopefully this phone will last me two years and I’m sure that technology will have moved on by that time.

Cheers