cell phone » blog.haraldkraft.de

When Android status bar icons are blue or gray/white

Life and People, Technical No Responses »

Dec 102013

Anybody with an Android device (usually it doesn’t matter which OS and/or ROM you are running) has encountered the situation, when status bar icons (e.g. WIFI and/or GSM/UMTS) are either blue or gray/white. On a sidenote: whether it’s gray or white depends on the OS and the color settings, so from here on I will just write using the word “gray”.
Throughout the internet you can find various answers to the question why icons are either blue or gray. The short explanation is this:

BLUE: the device is “connected” to Google services
GRAY: the device is NOT connected to Google services

So what’s the long answer then, and what does it mean to be connected to Google services?

The story of an occasional Virgin Mobile cell phone

Life and People No Responses »

Dec 162011

For the past few years I’ve been using a Virgin Mobile cell phone every time I spent time in the United States. Because this was happening only once a year (meaning the rest of the year I’d be outside of the US and any US signal) I would use a plan that was good for a month and then just stop topping up until I would get back into the country. Of course this meant that I would lose the phone number and get a new one every time I got back; but since this was a holiday phone (in different places of the country with different contacts) that was totally fine. Besides, I know people who change their phone numbers (and email addresses) almost every month – and yes, I am being a bit dramatic here btw.

This year’s trip to Miami shouldn’t be any different: (re-)activate phone (=get a new number), top-up, fire away (=get to know ppl and write lots of texts).
However, this time it turned out to be sort of a chore, which I’ll be trying to document here.