Category: phone

I got my Verizon bill today, the first bill since I got my new phone. Hoo boy. I’ve been on a $15, 25 minute per month, plan for the last few years, and that’s generally been enough time for me. Sometimes I go a bit over, but usually not by more than a few minutes.

I went a little nuts with the new phone though, and racked up $75 in additional charges. Since it looks like I’m already well over the 25 minutes for this month, too, I’ve decided to switch to the $40 plan, which gives me 450 minutes. That ought to cover any ridiculous amount of phone usage I can manage, and it’ll let me use Mobile Web with (relative) abandon.

The $15 plan, though, was some kind of special plan that I’ll probably never be able to get back into, though, so that’s a bit of a pain. And I’ve always been kind of proud to have a calling plan that was cheaper than anyone else’s. Well, I knew it wouldn’t last forever!

Okay, this is hopefully the last post on my phone for a while. (See previous posts for context.) I went out last week to find an adapter to allow me to use a normal pair of headphones with the phone, for listening to music on it. It turns out that a normal $5 Radio Shack adapter, plugged into the Motorola USB adapter, only allows sound to come through one channel. I’m not 100% sure why this is, but it’s annoying. For now, I decided to just give up, and bought a pair of Motorola headphones that plug directly into the USB jack on the phone. They cost $30 from Best Buy. The sound is pretty good, but the earbud design doesn’t fit my ears that well.

Looking around on the internet now, I think I could have just bought something like this, but I didn’t see it in either Best Buy or Radio Shack last week, so I’d probably have to mail-order it. I may still do that, though I don’t think I can return the earphones now, since I tossed all the packaging.

Okay, so it took almost an hour to sync just under 2GB worth of songs to my SLVR. I guess that’s not so bad if you’re not going to do it too often. The interface for listening to the songs isn’t great. Once a song starts playing, most of the screen is eaten up by a big V-Cast logo. There’s a little control panel at the bottom of the screen, but they don’t show the artist/album/song info anywhere. Weird. I don’t see where that would be too hard to implement, and it’s pretty obvious that you’d want that stuff on the screen.

Oh, and the phone doesn’t come with an adapter to let you plug in a set of standard headphones. It does come with an adapter that lets you use anything with a 2.5mm plug, but no adapter for a 3.5mm plug.

I bought a 2GB MicroSD card for my SLVR this week. I don’t really need to use the phone as a music player, since I already have an iPod Nano and a regular iPod, but the card was cheap, so I figured I’d give it a try.

The phone only syncs with Windows Media Player, while I usually use iTunes, so I had to pull some music into WMP first. I just pointed in at my iTunes library, and it managed to pull it all in without any trouble.

Of course, it ignored all the Apple DRM’d files. It also ignored the non-DRM’d iTunes Plus songs too, which isn’t surprising, but was a bit disappointing. There ought to be a way to pull those into WMP, but apparently it’s non-trivial.

I attached the phone to my computer, and WMP detected it fine, and saw that it had a 2GB card. I allowed WMP to just shuffle a bunch of random songs out to it. The first attempt at syncing failed for some reason. I’m giving it another try right now, and it’s working, but it’s going slowly. I think part of the reason for that is that it’s converting MP3s to WMA files on the fly as it syncs. (At least, I *think* that’s what it’s doing.)

While I’m waiting for that to finish, I’m watching Apple’s 20 minute iPhone tour. It looks pretty good, but I’m still not buying one, until it works on a faster network and costs a bit less!

Here’s a link to some fun iPhone coverage on Engadget, and more on Gizmodo.

I got myself a new Motorola SLVR a couple of days ago. My old phone was working fine, but it was several years old, and wasn’t compatible with Verizon’s Mobile Web 2.0. I had just gotten an e-mail from Verizon saying that they were going to discontinue Mobile Web 1.0, so I figured now was a good time to pick up a new phone. Plus, having a new phone (with a new contract) effectively prevents me from getting dragged into Steve Job’s reality distortion field, and blowing $600 on an iPhone.

I haven’t done too many exciting things with the SLVR yet, but I did manage to hook it up to my computer and transfer a song to it, using the instructions found here and with a spare USB cable. And I tried to get BitPim working, but didn’t have any luck. (I didn’t spend too much time on it though.)

I may pick up a 2GB MicroSD card for it, and load some more music onto it, but I really don’t need to do that, since I already have an iPod Nano.

A while back, I considered signing up for Verizon’s iobi service. I didn’t do it at the time, but I’ve been thinking about it again. I just checked the Verizon site, and some random blog posts talking about it, and realized something that wasn’t obvious the last time I looked at it: if you want to use the voice mail feature, you have to pay for that separately. So, instead of just being $8 per month, it’s more like $14 or so, depending on how much voice mail is. (I think it’s $6/month.)

That Cablevision VoIP thing is looking better and better. Most of the stuff you get with iobi comes free with Optimum Voice.

I was taking a look at phones again tonight. My main motivation for this is that my new iBook has Bluetooth, so it would be cool to pick up a Bluetooth phone that I can sync to the iBook. I still like the Motorola E815. It does appear to sync OK with Macs via iSync. Phonescoop and HowardChui.com both seem to be good good resources for phone stuff.