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Always get professional help. The tips presented on these pages are meant as a guide to help you get answers to your questions. I recommend that anyone who is not comfortable with the technology being discussed contact a professional for assistance. I cannot assist or be responsible for problems derived from this information.

Cell phone general rant...

Posted 5/13/07 from an email rant I had written weeks before.

Background:

About a month ago I had the privilege of switching phone companies. I switched for reasons I don’t really want to go into.

The situation: In order to make the switch we had to purchase Verizon phones, so I bought three. One was for my wife, one was for the house and one was for me. I picked the Samsung a930 and I figured it was not the type of thing my wife would like so I got her a Motorola RAZR V3M and for the house we got an LG VX5300. (The LG was free because I was buying the other two phones.)

The first thing I did was start checking on what kind of options I had for moving data back and fourth from the computer. After all what good is taking pictures that you can’t save, print etc. and what is the point of having an MP3 style music player if you can’t put your music on it. Previously we had used Datapilot to move sound and picture files back and fourth to the computer from our old phones. It was slow and archaic but it worked.

I read the phone manuals which were no help. Then being an internet sleuth I spent several hours searching the web trying to find out why the questions I had were not addressed in the manuals.

The Picture:

Basically some phone carriers appear to be trying to nickel and dime everyone to death. Foremost they try to sell everyone on services that may not even be available in your area. In addition they try to get you to buy everything from them using their online crude. " Go to our website.... Download your songs and pictures at a $1.00 each.... then find out that they can’t be used as ringtones and download the same music as a ringtone for $1.00 each. Email your pictures so you can get them off the phone at $0.25 each...." when that sales pitch fails they try to push the Music Transfer package on you. (More on this later) Buy this CD and cable $39.95.....etc. etc. You get the idea.

How do they get away with it:

Obviously people are confused at the array of options, phone services, phone types and all the techno-babble that comes with it. To further force the issue, many of the Motorola and Samsung phones have the features that let you do a lot of this turned off. The carrier buys the phones and disables these features or has Motorola or Samsung or whomever disable them. I discovered this while trying to send some music MP3 files to our new phones. Apparently our new carrier takes the v3m's from Motorola and disables several of these features . (On models of the Motorola RAZR one of the disabled features is USB file transfer.) You can fix them by doing a "seem" edit on the phone using a computer hack or using a hex editor etc., but man, finding all of this info is a major headache. In the case of the Samsung the MP3 option is in a hidden locked menu More on how to fix these later.

BTW: They also disable all of the Bluetooth functions except handsfree, so no Bluetooth transfers for you! I will probably get mad and check into this later also.

My current solution:

I downloaded a couple of different sets of mobile USB device drivers until I got one that let the computer recognize the Motorola RAZR. I then found a transfer program that is available "free" called BITPIM and presto. Windows media player also recognizes the synch for the phone. I can now move *music, pictures and other features back and fourth from her phone to the computer for Free. The same is true with my Samsung phone, although I made the mistake of paying $29.95 for the Music Transfer package before I knew any of this.

*Please note: When I say Music in the above paragraph I mean WMA formatted music files that you can play like an mp3 player does. I do not mean actual MP3 files and I do not mean ringtones. See Ringtone issues below.

So I can currently transfer information from the BITPIM program to both phones. This includes Calendar, Phonebook, pictures, WMA music files and in the case of the Samsung phone I can also transfer ringtones.

I do not want to give anyone the illusion that any of this was simple to figure out or get to work. If your music files are in MP3 format you have to convert them to WMA format in order to transfer them as music. In the case of the Razor phone you may have to perform a Seem hack (may void your warranty) to get it to talk via the USB cable at all and I was never able to get the ringtone transfer to work in BITPIM (The program has only been tweaked to work with the V3C RAZR and not the V3M.)

A note about Ringtones: Apparently carriers like the idea of selling music twice. You cannot make your phone music a ringtone regarless if you got it from your carrier or not. Ringtones on my phones must be midi files. To make and transfer ringtones you must convert your MP3 or WMA files to Midi format. BITPIM has a cluncky feature for converting and cutting MP3 files to MIDI format, but you then have to change the file name extension to .mid manually before transfer.

So, what do you need to do this:

You need BITPIM.

You need a USB cable that will connect your computer to your phone. (Has anyone noticed that I have not said anything about the VX 5300 LG phone? BITPIM has the phone listed as supported, but I could not test it because it uses a third type of USB cable connector that I don’t have. All 3 Verizon phones are different manufactuers and have different cable connectors and chargers.)

You need a USB device driver that will work for talking to your phone. (Some manufactuers actually have this available for download.)

In the case of the RAZR you may need two additional programs to make the Seem edit to allow USB connections (WARNING – Several sites posted that some carriers have said that twiddling even one bit on the phone will void your warranty)

II’ll list where to get all of this stuff at the bottom of this rant. Along with some info on how to hack/fix the RARZ for USB transfer. For now, you need to look at the alternatives and decide if this is worth it or not.

Other Ways: There are other ways to do this and they may actually be better provided you don’t mind spending some money.

One: buy a large or unlimited transfer package as part of your monthly service.

Two: Pay individually for every music file, ringtone and picture you want to transfer.

Three: Buy SD MEMORY CARDS or Trans Flash . This is another way to get around the problem. You can install a mini SD memory card (also referred to as a TF Trans Flash) into the phone then use a "full sized" adapter to connect it to an SD reader on a computer. ($29 - $49.00 roughly, but look for them at places like Walmart. Your Cellular service provider will gladly sell you the same thing for between $50 and $80). There are some tricks involved though. My carrier fixed it so that when the phones format the miniSD card there is no music folder for transferring music from the computer. They try to push a music transfer package on you anyway. To fix the problem you have to manually create the folder on the computer side. I haven't actually done this yet, but if anyone needs help I have read several dozen pages on the subject and plan to get two mini SD cards in the near future.

I actually bought this music transfer package for my Samsung a930 phone, but the reason I did was a free set of mini headphones and the USB cable. The Samsung does not use the standard or mini usb connector. It uses a large one like you see on some of the phone chargers and I did not have it. Anyway the sync software was not really needed apparently. Most of what it does is put hooks into the Windows media player so that your "buy music from from us junk is in there." My wifes RAZR uses a standard usb mini connector which I happened to have lying around.

Four: Sign up for your carriers web service and email the stuff to your own phone. This is how I got ringtones on my wifes RAZR phone. First I created them from my music files and saved them as MIDI files using the BITPIM program. Then I sent an email to my wifes phone account at at the carrier's website and I attached the midi files to it.

Motorola RAZR V3M:

My wife ran into what would seem a simple problem and I am positive it must be in the manual somewhere, but apparently the fact that you have to hold the speakerphone button in on the left side of the phone (until it displayes speakerphone off) to turn the speakerphone off seems to have alluded several thousand users. My search on the topic turned up 226,000 related postings. The first 10 or so all read “How do I turn off the speakerphone?” or “My speakerphone won’t turn off!”

Samsung a930 info:

First let me say that I am very happy with this phone. It is a digital music player, phone, camera, camcorder, note keeper, voice recorder…. And it does it all fairly well.

Obviously if I could afford the service fees and the initial cost I would be looking at a blackberry, but I can’t so my budget conscience chose the best of what I could afford. The phone has many features I am not even using (not paying for them yet) like GPS and web access etc.

Common issues:

It is an MP3 player that won’t play MP3 files.

The reason? My carrier had the MP3 option hidden (apparently as another reason to force people to use WMA format so it would be more difficult to get files without using their Music Transfer Kit or the purchase online solutions – which only works with WMA file formats and Windows Media Player.) For those of you who might not understand why this matters, the simple answer is that MP3 files use more data and give a cleaner sound.

The answer? There are hidden/secret menus on the a930 that you can get to. I found the following on the Internet. Follow these steps to turn MP3 on:

1.) Go to the Settings & Tools menu

2.) Press #

3.) Enter 000000 as the lock code

4.) Press 0 in this menu

5.) Enter 8886573982 as the lock code

6.) There is an MP3 option on this menu. Turn it on. (Note: it won’t work without a miniSD card installed.)

The a930 has a 10x zoom camera but won’t zoom.

This is actually a hard issue to find info on. For one thing the word “zoom” apparently does not appear anywhere in the manual! This is really a resolution setting issue. The camera defaults to the highest resolution setting. Lowering the resolution allows the zoom function to work.

The a930 camera is taking upside down pictures.

There are two possible reasons for this. First the camera can be rotated (it is mounted like a barrel) and rotating it to point at you while you are holding the phone in a normal manor makes it upside down. At first this seems very stupid, but while operating the camera the volume up and down keys also act as a 180 degree flip. So either you have rotated the camera or you have pressed one of those keys while in camera mode.

Phone locks:

I had mentioned that I had to buy new phones when I switched services. I forgot to tell you why. As many of you know phone companies put locks on their phones so that they only work with their service. So a motorola Razor sold as a Cingular phone won't work as a Verizon phone and vise versa.

It has been determined that unlocking these phones for the purpose of using them on another network is legal which is good news, but sadly it is not that easy. If you have an expensive phone and you switch services you might want to search the net for the "how to do it" info.

Here is an article link that my friend and fellow computer tech Jerry sent me :

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2069846,00.asp

Here is a quote from that PC Magizine Article : "On recent Motorola phones, that involves disassembling the phone, drilling into a shield over the main circuit board to tap into the right contacts and kicking the phone into a special diagnostic mode to get at the unlocking code."

Most phones do not require you to go to that much of an extreme.

However, even switching on the same carrier service can be a headache. I believe Verizon will do it for you if you bring a Verizon phone in, but of course they will make great efforts to sell you a phone.

BTW: That RAZR that you got for $99.00 with a $50.00 rebate will cost you $249.00 or more if you go to Verizon to replace it.

In my case, my old phone was a fairly new Motorola V235. A decent simple camera phone. Because my sons LG was not as nice and because he was still on Cingular I decided to give my old phone to him. Cingular uses the individual Simm chip for phones so all I had to do was give it to my son who put his own chip in it and presto it switched to his data and his number.

GSM and CDMA

One last thing. When reading about your phone and how to fix it you may run accross references to GSM and CDMA. Basically these are the two carrier types. It refers to the network service that your service provider uses as well as the "type" of Cell phone being used.

A few of the things I found out about our area recently was that Cingular owns most of the towers in my area. The bulk of them were put up by Cellular One which was bought by Cingular which is now the "new AT&T." Verizon piggybacks off of these towers. I am not sure if the towers were built for both types of service or exactly how that works, but it is interesting.

GSM dominates the world market, but CDMA has more customers than GSM in the U.S. Basically both types of service are offered in most U.S. locations. There is a great web page with info on this subject at http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-difference-between-gsm-and-cdma.htm Here is a note that they have on the Roaming issue in regards to GSM versus CDMA: "Roaming: For the most part, both networks have fairly concentrated coverage in major cities and along major highways. GSM carriers, however, have roaming contracts with other GSM carriers, allowing wider coverage of more rural areas, generally speaking, often without roaming charges to the customer. CDMA networks may not cover rural areas as well as GSM carriers, and though they may contract with GSM cells for roaming in more rural areas, the charge to the customer will generally be significantly higher. "

Also they point out who is who: "The chief GSM carriers in the United States are Cingular Wireless, recently merged with AT&T Wireless, and T-Mobile USA. Major CDMA carriers are Sprint PCS, Verizon and Virgin Mobile. There are also several smaller cellular companies on both networks."

Websites you should visit if you are having similar issues:

Bitpim software

http://www.bitpim.org/ <-- Notice the ".org"

Samsung Phone Drivers

http://www.samsung.com/support/productsupport/download/index.aspx

More Helpful Related Bookmarks

1 USBDriver - Mark Venture's Verizon Mobile Help Pages - Motorola-LG

Digg - Verizon Cripples RAZR Phones Audio Ability

Hack the Razr Guides How to Seem Edit

How to cut songs

HowToEmail - Mark Venture's Verizon Mobile Help Pages - Motorola-LG

Mark Venture's Verizon Mobile Help Pages - Motorola-LG

Motorola RAZR V3m User's Guide HomePage

Motorola RAZR V3m User's Guide UsingBasics

Sound File Conversion - Audio File Format Converter Software

V CAST Music Essentials Manager DownloadThis is Verizon's version of Windows Media Player (free)

V710 BitPim - Mark Venture's Verizon Mobile Help Pages - Motorola-LG

V710 Ringers - Mark Venture's Verizon Mobile Help Pages - Motorola-LG

V710 SeemEdit - Mark Venture's Verizon Mobile Help Pages - Motorola-LG

V710 TransFlash - Mark Venture's Verizon Mobile Help Pages - Motorola-LG

vB Easy Archive - A930 (Set ups for ~ DUN, WAP, MP3, View Six Hidden Menu's)

vB Easy Archive - A930 Ringtones