August 11, 2006
New Gadget, new hassles
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I picked up a Motorola Razr V3 in the states, locked to T-Mobile. Ok, that was problem #1. My cunning plan was to have the phone unlocked and trade SIM cards back and forth between Africa and the U.S., as I did with my Nokia 6600. Turns out that T-Mobile's policy is that you must own the phone 90 days before they'll unlock it. I sent mail to their customer support detailing my unique circumstances and describing how willing I am to be their paying customer while in the States. I received a boilerplate restatement of their policy from the front-line support person. It's that lack of attention to detail and real customer service (by the way, CS is more than just answering the email...) that sends me looking for the competition. Anyway, I digress. I did what any self-respecting geek would do: I ordered the unlock software and codes online. Worked like a charm! I'll have to find the link and post it here. Now I have an unlocked phone which I've verified works in both Seattle on T-Mobile and in Cape Town on Vodacom. Hmm, and when I return, will I continue to use T-Mobile? Guess that will depend on their stellar customer service. What I really meant to write about was my travails getting bluetooth working between the phone and the MacBook (purr, kitty kitty.... love this laptop). iSync works great, file transfer works great - loving it so far. Wait..... I try to pair with Address Book and nothing... It keeps asking for the code and re-pairing. Damn. My favorite feature doesn't work. You see, I send lots of SMS's here and have enjoyed typing them from the laptop and sending via Address Book (click on a mobile number while bt-bonded and select SMS Message). Seems this doesn't work with the Razr and I'm not the only one to find out (Google for it). Wish I'd paid a bit more attention before buying. |