No iPod Required

My Motorola cell phone really sucks. I came to this conclusion after being frustrated time and time again with its poor reception quality and its absolutely horrible software. I even took it to a Cingular store in hopes that the firmware could be flashed to a newer version (a coworker had his phone updated - but it was a slightly newer version of the same phone). According to the Cingular guy, Motorola says the firmware is fine - no flashing required.

I decided to search for a new phone - specifically a used AT&T GSM phone (since my SIM card was from AT&T, I could just stick it in the phone and voila!), or an unlocked GSM phone that could accept my AT&T SIM card. I did some research, and decided that the phone I wanted was the Audiovox SMT5600. After a few days of looking, an unlocked phone appeared on eBay and I grabbed it.

It finally arrived a couple of days ago, and I must admit - it rocks. I'm not going to list off all the features - you can read about them for yourself. The one feature that I will talk about a little is the Windows Media Player 10 Mobile.

As I discussed in a previous post, I subscribe to Yahoo's Music Unlimited service. Each track downloaded from this service contains DRM, so I can't just copy them to any device and listen. I first copied a track to the phone using Windows Explorer, and when I attempted to listen, the phone told me that it needed to acquire a license for the track, and that it needed to connect to the Internet to get it. I let it try, but it didn't quite work. That pissed me off a bit, but the fact that the phone tried to play it and knew what it needed to do to play it was encouraging. I then tried to synchronize some tracks using Windows Media Player on my PC, hoping that the license might be acquired by Windows Media Player and transferred. Success! I can now listen to all my subscription tracks on my cell phone. So, I promptly bought a 1GB miniSD card to give me quite a few hours of audio. I have most of the album art for my library on my HD and Windows Media Player copied those to my phone too, so when tracks are playing, the phone displays the album cover on the screen. Very cool.