The Hanover Collaboration

It’s no trick to getting heaps of features from your mobile device. Just buy an expensive, kludgy, bulky, heavy smartphone (Treo, Q, Crackberry, etc) and let your provider (who will, I’ll admit, award you VIP status for your expenditures) run riot through your bank account each month.

For the clever, though, there is another way. Do some research, find some hacks, and turn a regular phone into a versatile, multiuse device. It’ll save you pocket space, self-respect and, most importantly, dough. Just drop me a message if you want some help setting these features up.

My cellphone bill is $53.78 every month – $40 for 450 minutes (free nights and weekends), 5 for 250 TXT/PIX messages and 5 for MobileWeb (which can be had for free if you don’t value reliability of access). Additionally, I spent no more than 75 dollars (bluetooth headphones ($35), 1gb flash card ($35) and USB flash card reader ($5)) setting all this up.

Here’s my set up – Verizon’s crippled version of the LG vx8300 (free with my agreement to another two years of servitude), now has the following functions:

Mobile Phone: obvs.

Clock: Because I don’t have a watch.

Calculator: Includes the EZ Tip calc, which I overuse.

Alarm Clock: I do have one of these, and chances are you do, too. But it’s in your bedroom, and you can never be sure of where you’ll be sleeping…

Address Book/SIM card: Through the magic of BitPim, I can overcome some of Verizon’s evil and transfer contacts to and from my phone to a computer via Bluetooth (it’s kind of like the fat fairy godmother converting Sleeping Beauty’s death to a deep sleep). Only Phone# and email. I can also back this data up on my computer, avoiding Verizon’s $10 data transfer charge between phones, and replacing (kind of) the SIM card lacking in most CDMA phones.

Calendar: I’ve never had to use it. But in theory, it should work with BitPim, too.

Camera: At 1.3 megapixels, it ain’t Ansel Adams pretty. But it’s not Robert Maplethorpe gross, either. See for yourself.

Video Recorder: Limited picture quality, no sound. But did I mention it fits in pocket and does all this other crap?

MP3 Player: I bought a 1 gig flash card. Now my phone is an iPod Shuffle. Except with a display, so I can see what songs are coming up next. And external speakers. And Bluetooth, so I can use wireless headphones. Oh, and it has built in speakers. And, if God loves us and smites Verizon, it will have wireless music transfer in the future.

Video Player: So turns out if you get (read: “steal a serial number for”) Quicktime Pro, you can convert a 700mb DVD rip (I’ve gotten it to work with any format except .rm), you can shrink it into a 50mb .3gp file. Why .3gp? Because it plays on your phone. So next time you have a 2 hour wait at the RMV, you can kick back and watch Super Troopers. And you can fit a lot of 50mb movies on a 1 gig card.

Modem: A modem is a phone that speaks in 1’s and 0’s. A cell phone is a modem without the restrictions of a dinky phone cable. Anywhere I get cell reception, I can go online, at around 100kbps if I have 1x service. It should be faster, but Verizon blocks data call access to EVDO (a-holes). They do, however, allow me to use Bluetooth to connect the phone to the laptop for modem use.

Satellite Radio: Not that XM and Sirius need my help to loose money, but cell modem + laptop + iTunes + Internet radio feed on iTunes = uninterrupted music of my choosing anywhere I have cell access (essentially, nationwide). Great for weekend car trips.

Micro Data Storage: Those little thumb drives you buy are essentially flash cards with plastic cases hooked up to a USB port. So I bought one of those without a card in it, and use it as a card reader. Take data off the computer, put it on the card, put the card in the phone. This is also a much faster (and with Verizon’s Bluetooth crippling, the only) way of tranferring data off the phone.

Internet Browser: I can also browse the internet using the phones MobileWeb feature. Wikipedia’s WAP version is very handy, as is Gmail.*

Email: I can also send email to and from the phone via TXT. My phone’s address is [phone number]@vtext.com. Apparently, all verizon phones have this feature. A great way to avoid passing along picture messaging charges to your friends.

Instant Messager: Yup. You can set up AOL’s popular IM service to send to and receive from your phone via TXT message. There’s also a MobleAIM service that does the same thing while showing your friends’ status.

“Customization”: Most people pay Verizon to ream them on ringtones. BitPim allows me to get them for free from my existing music collection. I can even edit them. Same thing with wallpapers.

Beefs
The following are my beefs with current situation (not counting the crippling and lack of EVDO mentioned above):

• No iSync support. It would be a whole lot cleaner than ugly, buggy BitPim.
  
• No Multitasking. I can’t so much as check the time while listing to music? Who coded this crap?
  
• Buggy!. I realize a lot of the things I do to get music playing on this phone are a bit bandito, but still – crashing an MP3 player should be next to impossible.
  
• Compatability. This is a bigtime issue. Verizon’s phone apps all run on some half-assed proprietary environment called BREW. Apparently, developing for it is like running through nettles in hot pants. Google Maps, facebook, and a whole host of other fun, useful, and most importatly free apps use a mobile version of Java. If Wikipedia is truthing me, there is no end-user advantage to having a BREW phone.

*Gmail has a much better J2ME app that I can’t use

[This post previously published as a Facebook Note on 11/29/06]