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          


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