My new phone
About a week ago, my RAZR V3 phone
started to fail. It worked fine, but neither screen showed anything at all. I
managed to reset it by following along with another RAZR, but no luck. The phone
could make and receive calls just fine, but without a display it seemed destined
for the scrap
heap.
Eventually I
plugged it in to recharge, and the screens worked again. However, a few days
later the outside screen would display all
blue.
I was never happy
with the RAZR software. In particular, I wanted the Address Book feature to
actually store addresses. (Then the phone would actually be a PDA.) So I tried
getting a new phone via my provider, Cingular. I went to a bunch of stores, but
all were unhelpful. I was willing to extend my contract, but since it still had
a year to run, I would have to pay the list price. Didn’t seem like a good
deal to me. I figured I’d be better off buying an unlocked phone on eBay,
and could then switch to another carrier once my contract ran
out.
I looked at a bunch
of phones (luckily I work in a company that creates mobile phone software, so
there were lots handy — most stores make it hard to try out phones). I
finally resolved on a Nokia 6102i, since it was likely to synchronize with my
Mac, and it had an actual address
book.
I found new
unlocked phones on eBay, and after a few days managed to get a winning
bid.
iSync wouldn’t
work out of the box, but I was able to find a plugin (Nokia6102i.phoneplugin,
installed in ~/Library/PhonePlugins), and it synched just
fine.
(Eventually I
discovered that the Address Book has a limited size, and had to do a little
pruning of ancient entries.)
Posted: Fri - August 4, 2006 at 11:40 AM