You know me, I don't like to complain

You know me, I don’t like to complain, but the Verizon Wireless RAZR V3M is probably the worst mobile phone I’ve ever owned.

First of all, obviously this isn’t something I would have purchased myself. It was the handset that MEGACORP gave me when they stopped paying parts of phone bills and decided that they’d buy us all mobile phones instead. Most of the people in my department just suck it up and forward the calls to their personal mobile numbers or VoIP lines, and with good reason.

This phone sucks.

Actually, the handset itself is probably fine, but I’d never know, because the one I get in the box from Verizon is nothing like the one that Motorola shipped them. Mine has a browser on it, so that you can buy shit. You can go to a little store and pay whatever dollars for a ringtone of the Theme from Shaft or whatever, and purchase a copy of Tetris or something. Fine. Whatever. Nice that they give that option I suppose.

But what they really do is make that your only option to put anything on the handset.

Even more insane is that while the phone has a Contacts and Calendar application, you cannot sync it to a computer. While I was waiting for Activation Guy to sort out the ins and outs of configuring this device so that it would work, I was asking where I needed to go to download the sync software so I could put my Outlook crap into it. I figure, if I am going to carry around a second phone, it may as well have my office schedule and contacts on it. That way my real phone can manage my personal stuff and my work phone can have my work stuff. That sounded like a reasonable idea to me.

“You can’t do that,” said Activation Guy, “That phone doesn’t support it. You can take your addressbook to a Verizon Wireless Store and they can put your contacts into the phone for you,” which sounds helpful at first, but it isn’t. You can’t update the contacts except to do it manually, which on a handset isn’t trivial. So every time I have to change a few contacts, I’m supposed to go to a Verizon store? How is that helpful? And the handset does support it by the way: Verizon doesn’t let you do it beacuse they take that feature away from you. Presumably so you have to go into a Verizon Wireless Store and wait in line behind the similarly angry customers to have them do what you should have been allowed to do yourself.

I honestly don’t even know why they left the Calendar application on there, because it is completely useless without some sort of sync function. Are you really going to tap in all of your appointments into a RAZR? Me either. They could have just left an alarm clock on it, pulled the Calender, and kicked me in the stomach and called it even.

Since it has a browser, I assumed I could at least hook it up to my Thinkpad to let me get online and hop on the VPN and check email and handle an escalation if I’m oncall and away from WiFi or ethernet. Wrong again!

“This isn’t a data phone,” said Activation Guy, who was still trying to figure out why my phone couldn’t be programmed for the Verizon network. (That’s another thing, you have to program these stupid things yourself with the aid of a support tech once you get them. There is no SIM of course, because it’s CDMA, so you have to type in a series of numbers and follow hidden menus to make your phone service work). “What do you mean it isn’t a data phone? It says EVDO on the home screen. It has a browser.” “Oh, we don’t call that data,” he said. Suffice to say I wasn’t going to try to argue with Activation Guy about this, but apparently EVDO and 1xRTT aren’t data services. They’re just icons on your phone that light up to tell you that if you had a better phone you could actually get online. Though only if you used a cable like some kind of Neanderthal, because:

Verizon Wireless removed all Bluetooth profiles except for Bluetooth Headset. So there is no DUN, there is no OBEX, and there is no sync profile. They stripped it out of the firmware. It used to be there before they got their mits on it, so you can’t send over any media, send photos off the phone to your computer, or zap a ringtone you made over to it.

The charger for the RAZR V3M is a usb cable. But if you don’t use the USB cable and wall wart that Verizon Wireless gives you, the phone says “Unauthorized Charger”. It appears to still charge, though very slowly. I’ve been charging it for two days now and it isn’t full yet. If I find another outlet and plug in the supplied do-dad, it shuts up and charges, but be real—it’s a USB cable. Get over yourselves.

Every possible chance Verizon had to nickle and dime you, they took. Every step of the way is a walk around the yard at a prison. You get one hour a day to walk in a circle and then you’re brought back indoors for the beatings.

The funny part is that when I plugged it into the USB port on one of my Macs I could sync my addressbook to it. Interesting that it wasn’t possible half an hour ago, but my G5 from 2003 bent the laws of space and time to make it so. Still can’t sync my calendars to it though, which is just as well, since the phone isn’t fit to use on a regular basis with all of these limitations and will just continue to forward calls elsewhere to handsets that work.

Speaking of, I’ve been using a Nokia N95 for quite a while now and love it, and recently picked up an E61i, also from Nokia, which has been really nice as a messenger and organizer. More to come on those later after I’m done recovering from having my head slammed into the wall repeatedly by Verizon Wireless.

After spending years with GSM operators I’m reminded of why they’re superior: I can bring my own equipment and manage it myself.