Go to Settings > Wireless & Networks > Mobile Networks > Network Mode

Once you’re there, select “CDMA Only”

Give the phone a minute to make the change, you should see your signal icon go to 3G and have some bars. This isn’t as fast as 4G but it will keep the phone from dropping data altogether while it searches for a 4G signal.

Some phones don’t have as much problem seamlessly switching between 4G and 3G, but this helped me out greatly on my HTC Thunderbolt.

You can read more about the Verizon Outages in December 2011 here.

There is new functionality in android 2.2 (Froyo) that allows for Chrome to send links directly to the handset wirelessly, via the phone’s data plan care of your Google account, and automatically launch the links in the appropriate application. This is accomplished by installing the Chrome to Phone plugin for Chrome, and installing the Chrome to Phone app on your android 2.2 handset. What you end up with is a little icon next to your address bar in Chrome, once you click it, it sends the link to your phone and your phone launches the appropriate app. Currently Google Maps, YouTube and internet pages are supported.

Here is the QR Code to download the app directly to your phone.

Could we take it even further?

What if we had a way to share our Desktop, Laptop and Handset screens simultaneously? I think we can write an app for the phone that syncs the device with other machines in real time, via a user’s google account. We could have a ‘tray’ on each of our machines that we can drag things into, that automatically sends them over to the handset. It is similar to google’s new functionality in Gmail where you can drag attachments from your desktop into chrome and drop them into emails. You can also drag attachments out of emails and drop them onto your desktop.

This all requires the Chrome browser be installed… but what if we had a program on our windows machine that acts similar to Chrome and puts hotspots (the tray mentioned earlier) on the screen for us? You install the program and the app and configure both with security credentials so they recognize eachother. It would all be seamless, it wouldn’t ask you for confirmation or anything unless you tried to drag a file that was too big for your phone’s storage capacity or some other problem that may occur.

I am aware that this is an extension of my first blog post.

We could write integration for epicurious, allrecipes, and other sites that offer ingredient lists for the dishes they displate. We could also write it to integrate with food network. This thing can hook up with the manufacturer/grower’s site that has nutritional information in a database. We’ll pull all of that in and you can have your shopping list, and hover over each item for all of the information you could ever want on an item… including google shopper prices, it can hook up with your GPS coords and let you know the cheapest place to find the ingredients within <user defined> miles.

All of this built in to a concise shopping list that you have access to from virtually anywhere in world.

Of course Drag-and-Drop functionality would be included as well. It would probably be particularly useful to the Google Geniuses with their newfangled Chromium OS… or imagine this working on your smart phone/tablet as well? Fancy, indeed!