Once only available for Apple's mobile devices, Instagram is now available for Android. To say that Instagram is a photo sharing social network belies its true nature. Instagram appeals to our artistic nature, by providing the tools to turn snapshots into works of art. In this sense, it is a social network for those who love the art of photography. In terms of design, Instagram is similar to Tumbl...

There are just too many things to remember, so I write them down. I have a half-dozen different address books dating back to college. I have tried small notebooks, sticky notes, business card folders, and day calendars from large to pocket size. The trouble with address books is that they are not exactly portable. Notebooks work until they are full. I hated extracting all the useful information fr...

As of April 5, SUTEL implemented a blacklist for stolen phones. Over 800 mobile operators in 219 countries use the blacklist to report stolen phones. Once blacklisted, a phone cannot be activated by any of the cooperating mobile operators. To report a stolen phone in Costa Rica, call your mobile operator at these numbers: Kolbi/ICE: 1193 TuYo Movil: 1718 Movistar: 1693 FullMovil: 555 from...

Are you going to the beach for Semana Santa? If so, you are probably taking your cell phone with you. If you are a smartphone user, you know that the battery needs charging on a regular basis. Not only are smartphones huge data consumers, they are a huge battery power consumers. Smartphone specifications tell you the expected battery life in terms of Standby Time and Talk Time for both phone and d...

On Thursday, March 29, El Financiero published an article on a Deloitte technology marketing study for 2012. While Deloitte gave the presentation at Costa Rica Country Club, all the videos and PDF documents for the Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) study are available from Deloitte's Web site. This is a global study that discusses TMT trends for this year, and does not focus on a single...

You do not need a USB cable to share files between your mobile device and another mobile device or computer. All you need is a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connection. You can transfer contacts, messages, music, photos, eBooks, and more. All you need is an Android app on your mobile device. You do not need any special software on your PC. AirDroid is really easy to use. When you start AirDroid, the app d...

While we know how much cash we have, we rarely keep records of how we spend it. When we are low on cash, we head to the nearest ATM to get more. We are more likely to record ATM withdrawals in our checkbook, and we do record the checks that we write. If we make debit card purchases, we record them in our check register. As long as all the amounts are correct, and there no math mistakes, our check ...

By law, all cellphones sold by an authorized dealer in Costa Rica are unlocked GSM phones that meet Costa Rica's frequency standards. If you are bringing a phone to Costa Rica, it must meet the same requirements. A locked phone is simply one that is locked to a single cellphone carrier. Locking cellphones is a standard practice for USA carriers, who sell phones at a discounted rate as part of a...

QR (Quick Response) Codes are not UPC (Uniform Product Code) barcodes on steroids. While both digitize information into a graphical image, they serve different functions. The UPC numeric bar code was first used for point-of-sale in 1974, and is required for all point-of-sale transactions in many countries. In 1994, Densoo Wave, a subsidiary of Toyota, developed QR Codes to track vehicles during th...

I stopped buying printed newspapers years ago. At first, I would check individual newspapers via the Internet. I then started following major news sources on Twitter, and still follow this practice today. With Android, I moved to news aggregation apps. In addition to Twitter, I now use three different news and periodical apps. For Costa Rica newspapers, I tested three different Android apps. These...

The default Web browser for all Android devices it the Android Robot browser. It is neither the fasted, or most flexible Web browser. The Android browser is not the same on all distributions of Android. My pet peeve on Froyo was the lack of an easy way to exit the browser. The assumption was that the browser would always be executing. I could go back to the Home screen, but the browser was still o...

In the last article, we discussed Android apps that help you plan your trip in Costa Rica. In this article, we look at apps for planning flights, hotels, and rental cars. These apps are great tools for any traveler, whether visiting Costa Rica, or traveling to another country from Costa Rica. For the frequent traveler, they make life a lot easier. You no longer need to hunt for the emails from the...

Are you planning a visit to Costa Rica? Do you have an Android phone? If so, here are some handy Android travel apps that can aid you in planning your trip to Costa Rica. While having an unlocked GSM phone is preferred, you should be able to use these apps with any Android phone that has Wi-Fi access and a GPS. Planning a vacation starts with travel guides, and there are three good-to-excellent An...

On Tuesday (March 6), visitors to market.google.com, were redirected to play.google.com. Google did not make a big announcement about the change. There was none of the regular chatter on Android sites, about the upcoming changes. About five minutes after I discovered the change, the first tweets started to appear. It was a well kept secret, with the only clue being the change to a single policy fo...

I really have no good excuse for not learning Spanish. By just living in Costa Rica I have learned a few words and phrases, but I am a long ways from being a fluent Spanish speaker. I have the perfect learning tool laying on my desk. I just need to make a commitment to spend a fixed period of time everyday to learning Spanish. If you search the Android Market for all apps related to “Spanish le...

In a previous article published by The Costa Rica Star we discussed the rise of mobile SMS style banking in Costa Rica, in the article here within, we will get deeper into the details. There was a time, when all bank transactions required going to the nearest bank branch. In the mid-1970s, ATMs opened the doors to electronic banking. No longer restricted to banker's hours, we had access to our...

You may have heard that Android is a Linux-based operating system for mobile devices. This description of Android is incorrect on several levels. Linux, itself, only refers to the Linux kernel. The kernel is the software that manages requests from devices and requests from applications. In 1991, Linus Torvalds, while a student at Helsinki University of Technology, released the first version of ...

The info-graphic “Lost and Found: The Challenges of Finding Your Lost or Stolen Phone” (click the link and then click again to enlarge) from Lookout Mobile Security provides an interesting view of how mobile devices are lost and the chances of recovery. While this infographic applies to the USA, the information below applies here in Costa Rica. I personally think they should expand the swimming po...

While it is a traumatic event, mobile devices are lost. Statistically, there is a one chance in three of losing a mobile device. Many of my Tico friends admit that they lost a cell phone, and I once left my cell phone in a rental car. Sometimes, you find your lost mobile device. Other times, the lost mobile device becomes a stolen device. Losing a cell phone is bad enough, but loosing a smartphone...

Not too many years ago, public Wi-Fi hotspots were a rarity. As the market shifted to mobile devices, the demand for public Wi-Fi hotspots increased exponentially. Airports, hotels, coffee shops, restaurants, and bars quickly jumped on the band wagon to gain a competitive advantage. With our mobile devices, we look for public Wi-Fi hotspots. Mobile users rarely consider the dangers of a public Wi-...

A firewall is normally a software application (there are a few hardware firewalls) that protects an internal network, or a device, from unwanted intrusion (inbound firewall), and guards the traffic going to the network (outbound firewall). An inbound firewall is like a security guard, who checks your identity and belongings before you enter a building. Their job is to prevent unauthorized access t...

This article is necessary in the world that we live in today. The vast majority of smartphones, cellphones, and tablets are sold without having any antivirus or firewall protection, leaving you very open to getting attacked and losing personal information. With the rise of banking applications and a massive increase in the personal information being shared on your iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia, or ano...

As we saw in the last article, Wi-Fi uses radio frequencies as the medium of communications between the Wi-Fi router and devices on the Local Area Network (LAN). In some locations of my house, my tablet sees signals from the Casa Conde Hotel, which is over a block away. Radio signals do not stop at the walls of a building, or a property line. If the your Wi-Fi router is not secured, it is an open ...

We use the term Wi-Fi, but do we really know what it means. When looking at phone specifications, the Wi-Fi capabilities appear under WLAN (Wireless LAN), and LAN stands for Local Area Network. Don't you love acronyms that contain acronyms. Wireless tells us that we are using radio frequencies as the communications media. LAN tells that we are connecting multiple devices into a single network. To ...

The Internet is one huge network that is subdivided into many smaller networks. Internet routers connect multiple small networks together to a form a bigger network. Internet traffic routing is a fascinating subject, and complex subject. For our purpose, we only need to know the role a router plays in connecting multiple devices to a single address provided by our ISP. When you connect your Intern...

Whether for business or pleasure, having a connection to the Internet is part of our daily life. What happens, if you don't have a cable or WiFi connection to Internet? We carry a potential solution with us, and it is our cell phone. If your cell phone has a Web browser, it may act as a tether between another device and the Internet. Using your phone is a cost effective solution to purchasing a US...

When you connect to the Internet, your phone, data card, or cable modem, you are assigned a unique IP (Internet Protocol) address. The human readable form is a set of four numbers that are separated by a dot, such as 200.198.10.105. When an Internet application, not just your Web browser, makes a request to another Internet site, the site name resolves to the destination IP address. This establis...

The launch of the iPhone 4S in Costa Rica marks yet another step in this country's growing demand for smartphones. Apple always does a great job with launch publicity, but this time someone in Apple forgot to make sure that SUTEL has agreed with the launch of the iPhone 4S. A launch lunch turned into a meeting about non-compliance with SUTEL rules. Details like the iPhone's failure to have a plan ...

Whether on vacation or living in Costa Rica, the Internet is more than just a way to stay in touch with business. The internet is how we stay in touch with all our family friends, no matter where they are located. We live a mobile life style. As long as we can connect to Internet, we can chat, talk, and share photos. Our friends and family are part of our experience. The easiest way to connect ...

Once you have an unlocked GSM phone with a SIM card from either Kolbi, Claro, or Mobistar, you are ready to start using your phone. Costa Rica phone numbers are 8-digit phone numbers. A call to any number in Costa Rica is considered a local call. Some useful local phone numbers are: 911 – all emergencies 117 – police 118 – fire 113 – domestic directory assistance 114 – international directory...

From previous articles, we know that a cell phone must be an unlocked GSM phone that support the cell phone frequencies used in Costa Rica. If you don't have a phone that meets these criteria, then your choices are to rent a cell phone, buy a cell phone, or go without one during your vacation to Costa Rica. I tried the latter option, and survived about three days before buying a cell phone here in...

So many sites on the Internet promote that SIM cards are only available to citizens and legal residents of Costa Rica. This is a myth. Every cell phone service offers both Prepaid (Prepago) and Postpaid (Postpago). Prepaid means that you are pay according to use, and postpaid (contract) means that you get a monthly bill based on different plans. Prepaid SIM cards are available to anyone over the a...

The previous article focused on compatibility with ICE/Kolbi. This article expands the discussion to include Claro and Movistar. Adding these to the mix means that we need to go from quadband (4 band) phones to pentaband (5 band) phones. By the end of the article, you should be able to match your phone, with the bands supported by a Costa Rica carrier. Think of a cell phone as a super deluxe ra...

Not every cell phone works in Costa Rica. Before coming to Costa Rica, you can verify that your phone meets the necessary requirements. It must support GSM, as CDMA and LTE phones do not work here. It must support the 1800 Mhz band. Your phones user manual should contain this information in the specifications section. For example, a quad-band phone would appear as GSM 850/900/1800/1900. The ...