One of my co-workers has what I have diagnosed as a gadget destruction field.
When he bought a computer parts to put together a machine by himself, he found that the computer that resulted from his craftmanship was quite possibly the only brand new AMD that was slower than a Tandy TRS-80. When he bought a cellphone, it was only 2 months before the cellphone took a suicidal leap off his belt clip (remember folks -- phones on belt clips are NOT a fashion accesory) and into the toilet. A year ago, when he bought a 4G iPod, it had to be exchanged the next day due to inexplicable problems.
He also tends to be an early adopter of new gadgetry, so it did not surprise me in the least that when his cell phone contract expired last month that he traded in his old Nokia for a Motorola RAZR V3. After a month of use, his RAZR was malfunctional. The buttons with the exception of power on/off refused to accept input.
The replacement phone arrived fast enough, but he had saved all of his phone numbers to the phone's internal memory, not to the SIM card -- so then began the process of extracting the numbers off the phone without the use of the keypad. Luckily for my co-worker, Motorola has a USB mini-B plug on the side of the RAZR, and I happened to have a USB cable that would fit. After looking on the web for some installation instructions for Motorola phones, I stumbled across a step-by-step tutorial
for installing the Motorola Mobile Phone Tools.
No sign yet of any problems, but we did notice that the phone tools did not allow us to access wherever the commercial ringtones were stored.
I do have to give Motorola credit for having the foresight to have a USB port that uses a standard wire connector rather than some proprietary connection method like other cell phone companies.
Which brings me to my gripe. Why is it that cell phone companies feel the need to not include software with their phones? I ask this rhetorically because I know the answer: it's because phone companies want you to pay for the ringtones, graphics and games that you put on there, and if it was easy to do through included software, they'd lose out on revenue.
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