We recently renewed our contract with Verizon and upgraded our phones. We got Samsung A670s which have a built in camera. The problem was that to get the pictures off the phone, we’d have to pay Verizon 25¢ for each one. Also, we can customize the ringtones. But again, Verizon gets their pound of flesh. And they’re internet capable but, you guessed it, Verizon gets paid.

So I did some digging. There is a hack that allows you to get free internet service. Well, sort of free. You still pay Verizon air time and I don’t have a problem with that. And sort of a hack. It is perfectly legal, you just use a different IP address provider and a different WAP site than the one Verizon provides by default. So I figured out how to do that but that doesn’t solve the other problems. I did some more looking around and found that Radio Shack sells a USB cable for the a670 for $22. That is too much in my book so I checked the internet and found it for half elsewhere. Even with shipping it was less than I would have paid at Radio Shack before taxes. When I told the salesman that, he commented that I’d need software. That was $50 and I’m too cheap to pay that and it is Windows only and I’m all Mac. What I found instead was BitPim which does it all for free. I can pull pictures off the phone and upload ring tones. And that leads to the other issue: ringtones. There are thousands of sites out there that will sell you ringtones. All kinds of ringtones. Well, the truth of the matter is that are just MIDI files. So if you can find a MIDI of the song you like, down load it and send it to the phone. The a670 does not play polyphonic MIDIs but that’s okay with me.

So I have paid a grand total of $15 for at least $75 worth of phone stuff.

UPDATE: I added a link to the place I got the cable from. Also, I am investigating a lead on a format of polyphonic ringtones the phone will play. More when I get it.

Current Mactel status: Denial

I’m so conflicted about the whole “Apple on Intel” thingy. For me it isn’t that Intel is evil or anything, it is a philosophy issue. PowerPCs are RISC architecture. That means that the CPUs run more efficiently but have a smaller set of built-in computations. That is why a 1GHz G5 is actually faster than a 1GHz Pentium 4, the G5 is making better use of its time. Well, for the typical home user it is anyway. See, every instruction the CPU performs has to fit into the same number of clock cycles. So if the most complex instruction the CPU performs requires 24 clock cycles than the simplest instruction, which may only use 6 will have to take 24 anyway. That is the beauty of RISC. Most home users are never going to need the more complicated CPU instructions. Smaller is better.

But RISC doesn’t mean that the chip will always be superior. Motorola has lagged in advancement of the PowerPC line. Steve Jobs hinted that this was the real issue when he made the announcement. He put up a picture of a G5 with “3 GHz” beneath it and said that a year earlier he’d promised that and they hadn’t been able to deliver it. Well, Apple couldn’t deliver because Motorola
hadn’t.

So that is what Apple faced. A CPU that is more efficient but the line was going nowhere or switch to the one they have baited in the past. Really, the only way forward was with Intel, everyone else seems to be asleep at the wheel. No, that isn’t right, the only way forward was with the x86 chips, the other developers were asleep. There is still AMD. But not for Apple.

Steve said and demoed that Mac OS X sings on Intel. It isn’t like we’re going to be stuck with beige boxes of ugliness or anything. It isn’t like spyware and virus are a hardware problem. It isn’t like an Intel chip will make OS X be as bad as Window. But there is something about eating crow that just doesn’t agree with me. I’ll keep my G4 Powerbook as long as I can.