My wife and I both got new cell phones, almost on the same day. And this has caused all kinds of issues in the household, primarily divided into two groups of problems: the first, unfamiliarity with the new gizmos, and the second, a determination among various manufacturers to make absolutely certain it ain’t easy to transfer personal information like contact lists.

My old phone was a Sony Ericsson Z520a, a great little phone, but a little constricting when trying to make to-do lists, memos, and the like on-the-road…so I bought an LG Cookie (over on the left) at a great price; it’s a touch-screen phone that accepts java applications (so I’m not locked into someone else’s idea of what I can run on my own phone) and so far I kinda like it…it’s everything a modern phone should be (which tends to mean about everything except a telephone), and even handles importing vCard-format contacts, which I should have been able to get out of my old phone, but for some reason couldn’t. So I wasted a whole lot of time manually sending the contacts one-at-a-time from the SE to the LG via bluetooth. Once on the LG, editing was relatively easy what with the various input methods including phone keypad, QWERTY keyboard, and even handwriting-recognition (although there’s no programmer in the world good enough to program a device to recognize my writing!). Using down-time, I was able to get my contact list looking pretty good.

Annie’s was a whole ‘nother matter entirely; her old phone was an unlocked Motorola V3 we both learned to hate with a passion - it’s internal phonebook handling was terrible while it would randomly stop displaying entries we and the software knew were still in memory, and the Motorola Phone Tools software (which unlike every other major manufacturer isn’t available for free download, but must be purchased!) is absolutely frightening. I was so disgusted with this phone and the terrible firmware and software that I vowed never to by another Motorola phone - a vow I broke when buying a disposable phone for $20 with a $25 usage card and 35% Bing cashback, but nevermind that now. Anyway, the V3’s memory holds its data in a funky format, generating duplicate records for multiple phone numbers (I have a home, cell, and fax number, so there were actually three records on her cell phone even though it only looked like one), and getting the data exported was about as close to a nightmare as I’d ever want to experience…it was only using intimate knowledge of where the application stored its data, finding a piece of software that was abandoned by its author in the year 2000 to convert the WAB (Windows Address Book/Windows Contacts) format to vCard (requiring me to set the computer’s clock back to 1999 for a few minutes, of all crazy things), finding another piece of command-line software to “explode” the vCard file into separate files (the software that came with her new locked Samsung SGH-a777 couldn’t handle a vCard file with multiple cards), showing my wife how to edit the vCard format in WordPad without blowing it up, and finally importing a folderful of her edited and clean contacts into the Samsung software (which, I have to admit, is the best manufacturer’s software of any I had to deal with in this endeavor for dealing with the contacts, allowing smooth touch-up editing on not only the contacts on the PC, but direct-editing of the contacts on the phone as well all through a bluetooth “serial” connection, so kudos to Samsung) and sending them to the phone.

But it was an experience I don’t look forward to doing again any time soon…it’s as if each manufacturer was determined to use a completely different standard to maintain the data, almost intentionally making it difficult to move between brands. How in the devil do “mortals,” those non-geeks who don’t normally spend their days battling computers, get this accomplished? My guess is they allow their carrier drones to do it for them, which means they lose a lot of the data I was able with a lot of sweat and swearing to retain.

My LG Cookie is an unlocked quad-band phone, which means I can use it interchangeably on AT&T or T-Mobile, and even take it out of the country comfortably. It’s also unbranded, so I don’t have to worry about anything getting in my road…for example, I went to TinyTwitter, downloaded the JAD file which contained the location of the JAR file, downloaded that, put it on a microSD card which I popped into my Cookie, and when selecting it from the file browser the phone immediately offered to install it, thus saving me data charges (I’m a geek, I know, but I’m near-enough to WiFi hitspots I see no reason to pay for a data plan for my telephones, especially now that the carriers are killing the all-you-can-eat plans. While I’m being parenthetical, though, I should mention the lack of WiFi is something I dearly miss in the Cookie.)

Annie’s phone is, again, a whole ‘nother animal; AT&T and Samsung have, for reasons I can not comprehend but suspect deals with upping the data charges, locked the phone from doing anything sensible like that; the only way Java apps can be installed are via Internet download. Her phone doesn’t have a data plan either, and hers is paid for by her practice, so it would be rude to spend their money to download a game or utility app, so she’s kinda SOL even though one of the specifications on selecting this phone was that it contained Java. To make matters worse, the “productivity apps” provided with this phone are…well…the best is only average, and the worst dreadful (brickbats here cancelling out the previous kudos). The AT&T music application is better than I expected, but this phone’s speaker is basically useless for music listening (and speakerphone use, for that matter), and unlike my Cookie AT&T didn’t provide any headphones to connect to the proprietary connector (they didn’t include a USB cable either…phone, battery, and charger was the extent of AT&T’s generosity). Fortunately, there are places where one can acquire adapters, so shortly she will be able to “jam-to-the-tunes;” I set up a microSD card for her that contains a bunch of Billy Joel and John Denver hits, with plenty of room for some Gaelic music later.

But again, particularly with her phone, I feel like I have to constantly work around the limits the cell phone companies impose, instead of being able to use the devices the way I want. I’ve already decided never to purchase a phone from a cell phone company again…in fact, later this summer I’m going to visit my local AT&T store and talk about getting my bill reduced a bit, since they don’t have to subsidize the cost of a new cell phone. If they don’t, well, my contract is long over, and a T-Mobile SIM card will fit nicely inside this Cookie…