I’m an internet junkee. I admit it. That’s the first step, right? Anyway – today I’ve been missing my ability to access google from my cell phone. It’s weird that I am still able to get my email through the exchange server, but I can’t access any google web pages, including gmail, google.com, and their news.
I couldn’t find much information about this online. I for sure wasn’t able to find anything from my cell phone as I don’t think any search engines are as minty fresh as google when it comes to this kind of news. I tried looking on bing, but I couldn’t access bing from my phone either. I am able to access every other website I’ve tried, including Yahoo. So – yahoo was my search engine of choice today. Their mobile interface needs some improvements.
At first I thought my problem was maybe due to the custom ROM I’m using on my phone. I recently found a way to boot into Android on my phone, so I tried that and had the same problems. I know that Android has nothing to do with my custom ROM, so I figured it was some sort of Sprint issue combined with Google (and possibly Bing?). I figured it was possible it could have to do with a bad radio on my phone but I don’t think that would explain why I only have problems with the two sites and yet everything else works fine.
Now that I’m home, I’ve been able to do some real searches to see if I can find any news. I don’t know when my problems really started as I didn’t notice them until this morning. There was a thread started yesterday reporting problems accessing Google Apps. While it doesn’t seem like there is any explanation or solution, it was at least comforting to know that I’m not alone with my problem.
I’ll be really curious if I ever hear what is going on. At this point, I don’t really care why it’s a problem – I just want my Google back!
I’m still having problems today but I think I found a fix. It doesn’t make any sense to me why, but Opera Mini works fine! I just installed opera mini 5.1 which actually is pretty good thus far. I can access Google without any problems. Haven’t tried accessing Bing yet because I don’t need to now that I can get to Google.
As I wasn’t able to use google to find the opera .cab I went through yahoo which was just not pretty on this device. I found the most current download at opera.com so you can go there and navigate to the proper download. I’m curious if this works for others. Opera 10 and Opera 9 did not work. Internet explorer also did not work. I’m wondering what it is about mini that is not having problems with Sprint and Google. Very strange. I hope I see an explanation some where but I’m not counting on it.
I checked and I am able to get to Bing with Opera mini. Reading the above thread on xda forums someone else commented on mini working. Someone else then commented that opera mini uses proxy servers to access sites and therefore it would make sense it would not have the same problem.
The big question is whether this is something Sprint changed causing the problems or is it something on Google’s end. If I were a betting man, I’d bet it is a sprint issue. It otherwise doesn’t make sense that there would be problems on both bing and google. I wonder what Sprint did to break connections to google and bing. Maybe they are making a deal with yahoo?