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Category Archives: Phones

Cell Phones

MythTV to phone (.3gp) transcoder script and Bluetooth transfer

I built a perl script that can be used as a "User Job" from within mythtv to convert a recorded TV program into a cell phone (.3gp) movie. It makes uses of mythname.pl to get the show and title (for the filename) and mplayer/mencoder and ffmpeg to do the actual transcoding.
Unless you want to drop [...]

Cingular/ATT is locking down newer V3XX phones

I have one of the first Cingular branded v3xx phones that was released when they first hit the market. Although it came pre-stocked with shortcuts to Cingular stores, Cingular Music downloads, and had things like the IMAP email client disabled by default, it was still relatively easy to hack. I was able to use P2kCommander [...]

MIME Types for hosting J2ME .jar and .jad files

If you want a mobile phone to be able to download and install a java application (.jad/.jar file) from your website, you need to set up the correct MIME types for .jar and .jad files if they have not been set up by your webhost.
With apache, you can usually do this on a per-directory basis [...]

Freeing my V3xx phone from Cingular

After getting ATT/Cingular to take the subsidy lock off my phone, I decided to flash it with the generic International Motorola firmware. The advantages:

The Motorola firmware is not "branded" and gets rid of all of the "Shop Cingular" links, menu items, etc.
The quadband firmware claims to support all 4 GSM bands (instead of the 3 [...]

3G is better than EDGE for me!

Some idiot makes the claim that EDGE is just fine and you don't need 3G for web-browsing. The author claims that pure bandwidth doesn't matter, and that latency is more important to the user experience (which I totally agree with) but then goes on to state that 3G has worse latency than EDGE, which is [...]

Unlocking my Cingular / AT&T phone

AT&T allows some customers to "unlock" their phones. This allows the use of a SIM card from a different provider (for example, VodaFone) while traveling. (It also allows you to use the phone with another GSM provider in the US after your AT&T contract is finished, which is one reason AT&T and other carriers lock [...]

Motorola Razr V3xx SIM Lock problem

Apparently, many (but not all) Motorola V3xx phones from Cingular have a problem where they will not work with a locked SIM card. If you change your SIM code it will apply the changes, but as soon as it turns on the "SIM Lock" feature, the phone will not be able to access the Cingular [...]

Changing the outside display logo on a Razr V3XX

My RAZR V3xx has two screens, a small one on the "outside" and a larger one inside. During normal phone usage, the outside screen shows the Cingular logo. (Or the Motorola Logo if you have a non-branded phone.)
I decided to replace the Cingular logo with one of my own, so I used P2kCommander-v4.9.9 to [...]

Linux OBEX Push via bluetooth to the V3xx

I recently had trouble using the standard kbluetoothd and KDE OBEX file push client to send a movie to my Motorola V3xx cell phone over bluetooth. The transfers would be denied with no explanation. I decided to try the command line tool obexpush (written my  Marcel Holtmann of the BlueZ project) to see if I [...]

Review: Motorola RAZR V3xx

The Motorola RAZR V3xx  is one of Cingular's new non-smart 3G phones, and can be purchased relatively inexpensively with a contract. (Amazon sells them for 0.01 with a 2 year contract, cingular charged $79 the last time I checked.) Although it doesn't have a mini-qwerty keyboard and good email support like the Blackjack, [...]