Go-go Gadget Gosim

I got a prepaid Orange SIM card from GO-SIM today, after some panic it wouldn’t come before our trip to Spain.  The big question was whether or not the unlock trick I found online for my phone would work, and as far as I can tell, it has.  I guess the jury will remain out until I am on Spanish soil and the phone is working..  This trick seems pretty far-out, I wonder if this is an intentional back-door placed (and leaked) by the engineers or a exploited bug…   And if it’s a bug, who is the person who spent the time finding it?

Goodbye RAZR, Hello (phone with much less sexy name)

I have given up on the Motorola RAZR. After my third phone started doing the same annoying GSM waveform buzzing during calls (which both sides could hear) as well as turning off on it’s own again. Cingular had a few different phones I could exchange it for, and I ended up choosing the Samsung D807. It’s similarly sized (a bit thicker), but feature-wise it blows away the RAZR in just about every aspect (including LESS BUZZ-ITUDE!). The only downside is apparently Samsung didn’t implement SyncML properly or something because it is unsupported by iSync. So that really sucks, but I figured out a workaround (export my whole address book to a vCard file, use a tool to split it up until individual files, and send them all to the phone over Bluetooth. It’s not syncing, but at least I have my contacts on the phone now.

The camera is much nicer on this phone (1280×1024 vs 640×480), and I posted a few pictures to my Flickr Photostream from it. This is one thing that is much easier on the new phone. The RAZR didn’t do EDGE, so its data connection was really slow, but even worse, you couldn’t close the phone or exit the MMS sending screen until the message had fully been sent, or else the phone would just cancel the send. So if I wanted to send an email or a picture, I had to keep the clamshell open for a minute or two, which was pretty damn annoying. The new phone, I send it, close it, and throw it back in my pocket, making it much easier to send random pics as I walk around Boston.

New Phone has Landed

I got my new phone yesterday, and it was activated this afternoon. It seems that not all the services have finished catching up in the move from T-Mobile to Cingular, so while I seem to be able to receive voice calls, Text Messages and other data kinds of things seem to be blackholed for now. Hopefully this will clear up soon, otherwise I will give Cingular’s support it’s first go-around… Anyway, be aware that there may be some hiccups in the next few days as the carriers catch up…