About a month ago I got a $100 coupon for a new phone with Verizon. I looked online then ventured out to the store to see what I could get. The chocolate was being promoted for $150 with a $50 rebate, so I got one basically for free. They programmed it, moved all my contacts and whatnot from my old phone over, and synced it with my bluetooth headset. So I left the store with a nice new deep red LG chocolate.
The phone has mostly the same capabilities as my old phone, but with a sleeker form factor. It does everything just a little better. The MP3 player works better, the camera is faster, the interface has more eye candy.
As far as MP3s and pictures goes, it still has issues. BUT, nothing I couldn’t fix with a perl script! The lowest volume for the Mp3 player was too loud for my little ears. The phone also caches ID3 tag info, only reads id3v1 tags, and doesn’t support long filenames. So, I wrote a script that reads an iTunes playlist, copies the files to a temp directory creating an MD5 hash based filename from the original name (with some salt sprinkled in to force filenames to change anytime I need to update existing tags). It also reads the id3v2 tags and pumps them into the id3v1 so the phone can read them, then uses mp3gain to force the lowering of the volume (just sets a “gain” tag - doesn’t actually change the amplitude of the sound). I then do an rsync to the memory card, and I’m a happy fellow with a 1 gig mp3 player built into my phone. The phone supports up to an 8gig micro sd card, but my wallet doesn’t.
As for images, I haven’t exactly figured out how it sorts them on the phone. In any case, I wrote an importer script that can read the phone images, or images from my digital camera - it assesses the date and time based on either the filename or the exif data, then renames the files to a sortable format, changes the modified times to match, and resizes the image if necessary. For the most part all these files are sorting in date order (with some weird anomolies) on the phone. I think it may look at the date accessed field, which is dumb.
I’m also using the calendar more on this phone, and I’m using bitpim on the mac to sync the contacts and calendar via bluetooth. I also found in the mac developers kit where you can create your own phone profiles for iSync, so if I ever have time I’ll take a look at that.
Talking about bluetooth, but not the phone - I’ve been very happy with my Logitech wireless bluetooth laser mouse. It syncs with the mac no problem, has decent tracking on multiple surfaces, great battery life, no dumb usb dongle to futz with, and fits nicely in my notebook bag.