phone | Thoughts from James H. Lui

So you might have found it annoying
that your fuzzy new Android phone/tablet doesn’t like to connect to WiFi in certain places with the terms and conditions to accept before allowing you to connect.
For me and my Samsung S4 Mini, it turned out to be a minor issue with Chrome’s pop up blocking.

After getting the usual error page like this: [SSL CONNECTION ERROR]

or this [WEB PAGE NOT AVAILABLE]

I opened another window and happened to be on the flysfo.com

website going through the Samsung instructions when I noticed the page suddenly changed and up popped the Accept Terms and Conditions page.
Accepted it and off I went on SFO Free WiFi (yea.)
You’ll also notice the screenshot shows the gateway address for their portal service: http://216.9.98.194/guest
– hitting that link may have helped, too.

Attention Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola: why have you not taken a simple flip-phone cell design and embellished it just a wee bit to make it into a faux Star Trek ™ communicator?

Doesn’t need the touch-screen, or even a lot of 4G features. Even if it just worked as a cell phone, people would buy them just for the coillectors’ value. Done well, we’d all just like using them because they’d be small and easy to carry, but have a cool factor beyond description.

It’s worth licensing. Even if you never get around to making the bluetooth version chest communicator badge – which is an automatic up-sell.