After two years with an aging LG 3200, Samantha and I finally cashed in our "New Every Two" program from Verizon Wireless. Like most major purchases, we agonized a bit over the feature set, service plans and even carrier choices (if we did not want to stay with Verizon). Our primary concern was whether the phone would have decent reception where we live, as we do not use have a land line. Beyond that, something with better battery life would suffice.
I did have one other request that proved to be a bit more difficult to manage. I had heard of telephone being used as wireless modems and exchanging files via Bluetooth. The modem feature was not all that impressive (unless you are on the road, why waste wireless minutes?), but the Bluetooth feature had more traction.
The trouble is, if you go into a Verizon Store and utter the word "Bluetooth", almost automatically the associate will say "for audio only" about six times. It must be part of the locked-down feature set that Verizon forces upon cell phone manufacturers to protect the intellectual property rights (or whatever junk marketing term they come with) in order to sell more phone-specific ring-tones. In short, whatever you buy using the phone (ring tones, wallpapers, sounds, etc.) will stay on your phone until it dies.
My reason for asking was relatively simple. I use Mac OS X's Address Book to manage my 200 or so contacts that I have collected since my freshman year of college. I wanted to be able to send a a card to my phone without having to enter the information using the clumsy numeric keypad. It would be an added bonus to keep them in sync, but I really only expected that to work if I purchased a so-called "smart phone." No need for that.
We settled on our respective models, Samantha going with the VX5300, while I chose the VX8300. Mine was a bit more expensive and feature filled, but it ended up being a trade-off, as her phone had Tetris the last time around while mine barely calculated a dinner tip. Of course, the idgit at the Verizon Store assigned us each other's number before finally figuring out which was which. Samantha later discovered the service options were similarly borked.
My phone came with a month free of VCAST, the new broadband multimedia service. I played around with it a bit, only enjoying the free news updates and occasional hockey recap. I am not even sure how much it is a month, but I know it is not worth the extra charge. Instead, I purchased a 1 GB micro-SD card (about $50) and loaded it up with anything that I could possibly need.
I have created two simple wallpaper templates for Adobe Illustrator. If you do not have Illustrator (or would rather work in the image editor of your choice), here are the dimensions for the two screens.
- Main Display: 176 pixels wide, 184 pixels tall
- Front Display: 96 pixels wide, 81 pixels tall
As for the sought after feature, it works great once you "pair" the computer and the phone together. My only irk about it stems from how the phone reads the name on the vCard. Instead of saying "Stephen Yeargin", it comes across as "Yeargin;Stephen;M.;Mr.". Because I file my contacts by last name on my phone anyway, I just delete the extraneous semicolons, initials and salutations.
The battery life is much better than the 3200, but I think this has less to do with the phone and more to do with having a new battery. The camera is great, as it took my wallpaper shot at last Saturday's Predators game. The white balance is a little off in the arena, but the overhead lights do make the ice glow a bit.
Now to figure out how to set "All Along the Watchtower" as a ring tone.