» Saturday, 4 October A.D. 2008

stupid cell phone companies

A play in two acts.

Act 1: Verizon Wireless

When we were looking for houses, we found ourselves at a house without our trusty digital camera. I snapped some pictures with my phone (then a RAZR), thinking that I could easily get them off via Bluetooth. When we got home, I headed for the computer and spent several minutes attempting to figure out the magic incantation to make my phone send files via Bluetooth. I even unearthed the manual from the Tub o' Random Computer Bits and flipped through that. Nothing.

Undeterred, I turned to Google. In the course of searching, I found something quite interesting: previous revisions of the firmware for the RAZR used to possess this file upload capability, and it was mysteriously removed. I found numerous forums posts with confirmation of this fact and several with instructions on how to downgrade your phone so it would actually become useful. I was not brave enough to attempt flashing my firmware and I don't think I had the necessary cables and/or software on the desktop side. I settled for grumbling (loudly) at Verizon.

Why on earth would they do such a thing? Simple--I forgot to tell you about the preferred way to get pictures off your phone. Verizon runs a little service where you can send pictures from to your phone to an email address for 25 cents a pop. File upload via Bluetooth obviously wreaks havoc with this business model, so they ditched useful Bluetooth bits. (I think file download via Bluetooth was also disabled, as there was special, $$$ software that would do the same thing.) Obviously, 25 cents per picture is not a big deal (it would have been about a dollar total to get the house photos off my phone), but it was the principle of the thing.

Act 2: AT&T

My parents recently mentioned to us that we could jump on as riders to their family plan, which would be significantly cheaper than what we were paying now and a host of other goodies. (If you're wondering why we went from a Texas number to an Indianapolis number and back to a Texas number on our cell phones recently, this is the reason.) So we went hunting for phones at an AT&T store. I specifically asked the saleslady when the Bluetooth bits were, well, toothless, and she assured me that they worked great. I confirmed this fact after purchasing the phones and was quite pleased. It was the principle of the thing.

My new phone comes with a music player and I don't really understand why. I mean, sure, it's nice to have one fewer device in your pocket when you go out, I want my MP3 player to be my phone rather than vice versa. (So things like, at a minimum, headphone jacks don't require silly conversion kits to use properly.) But I had an epiphany the other day about how this could actually be useful: I could have Final Fantasy loops stored as music files on my phone. Which is not tremendously useful: I wouldn't want to go for a long car ride with nothing but the battle music from Final Fantasy IX for tunes. I could, however, use them for incoming call rings and (most of what I use my expensive phone for) alarm tones.

If you go and look, most of the Final Fantasy fansites out there provide loops in MIDI format. Which is all well and good, except MIDIs don't play on my phone. (Needless to say, trying to look for Final Fantasy ringtones of any kind were consistently met with, “Get free ringtones if you sign up for this service that secretly charges your credit card monthly fees,” which was not to my taste.) So I looked and finally figured out how to convert MIDIs to MP3s, which my phone does understand. I downloaded a bunch of MIDIs, converted them, and selected a precious few to fit in my 25MB phone.

They played, I was happy...until I went and tried to set one of them as my normal wake-me-up-in-the-morning alarm tone. I was met with this message:

Too large to set as Alarm Tone

Now, the savvy readers among you will already have figured out that my mission here was probably doomed from the start. However, I'm pretty sure that this message is simply Try To Make It Sound Like The User's Fault for:

You have not given tribute to the ringtone ogre

It's certainly possible that there's a good, technical reason for not being able to play a 500k MP3 (well, OK, maybe a 2M one) for an alarm. For comparison's sake, the ringtones that come with my phone weigh in at 50k or so. I haven't tried making an MP3 “small enough” (I don't even know if it would ever consider an MP3 “small enough”, since it's not an official ringtone format in the first place.) and if I get bored sometime, I'll certainly try. But being a computer programmer myself and more-or-less understanding how these things work, I doubt that there's any technical reason whatsoever and it's really just a “we don't want the user taking their songs and using them as ringtones.”

Clearly, I'm not the sort of person who wants to pay 99 cents or more per ringtone either. So that's right out.

Thanks, AT&T. I thought you were different. Any cell phone providers out there who are not actively out to screw their customers over?

posted by Nate @ 9:38PM