Microsoft Deal Limits Verizon MP3 Phones

An anonymous reader writes "PCSIntel is reporting that the new VCast music system by Verizon may not be quite as positive as users were led to believe. Claims were made that the new software for this service would disable the ability to play MP3s on these phones. It turns out that the ability to play MP3s still exists but only because the software first converts it to the WMA format. This conversion, however, is not available for phones on Mac or Linux, leaving these customers unable to play MP3s."

Comments

Why do you put up with this shit?

[Gordonjcp]

Every other country in the world has sane mobile phone pricing and services. Why not the US?

Re:Why do you put up with this shit?

[antifoidulus]

Um, just a question, have you actually LIVED in other countries and the US? I have lived in the US, Japan, and Germany and the US system is the cheapest(esp. if you want to use it as your only phone). It costs me 65 euro cents a minute to call on my mobile phone, it costs 20 cents a minute to call a mobile phone from a land line(which costs 20 euros a month just for basic service, it's cheaper to call across the globe than to call a cell phone across the street). You can get a good plan in the US for about $40 a month including taxes with more minutes than you could ever use(yeah, incoming calls aren't free, but with the amount of non-metered time and minutes they give you a month it isn't really a big deal). Not to mention it cost my mother $13 for a 4 minute call to my cellphone from the US. Yeah, there aren't cheap mp3 services, but honestly I don't give a fuck, I have an iPod for music, I don't need it on my phone.

Re:Why do you put up with this shit?

[zeenixus]

"It's not that one system is better - ours works well for the US consumer based on their phone use habits."

no, more like the phone companies here know how far they can turn the screws on their customers before too many customers will leave. And they're always looking for more screws to turn. Verizon is probably the most notorious. /me glances at his moto v710 with crippled bluetooth

Re:Why do you put up with this shit?

[Hank Powers]

Maybe you haven't been to Finland. We have such prices that calls cost only 6.9 cents a minute and the monthly basic fee is a little over than half a euro.

In addition to that, there are no obligations about using the phone provided by the operator. Just simple and understandable pricing without any "plans" as they're called in the US. In fact it is even forbidden by law sell operator-locked cellulars here. (However, they're trying to make it possible for 3G phones soon.)

Re:Why do you put up with this shit?

[Carthag]

While it's true that European cell rates are probably slightly higher than US ones (at least in my experience), I find the service as such to be orders of magnitude better. It's only in recent years that the US has even begun to compare to Europe in terms of coverage, interoperability, and legal issues (for instance, simlock removal has been required to be free by the service provider here in Denmark for years).

Re:Why do you put up with this shit?

[coolcold]

maybe you would want to check out the price in hong kong
landlines to mobile are free for landlines
mobile plans are like in the thousands minutes (incoming calls also use up minutes though) for 20 USD

my information were abit out-dated though :p

Re:Why do you put up with this shit?

[grumling]

Every other country in the world has sane mobile phone pricing and services. Why not the US?

Well, I don't know about pricing for phones in other contries, but here in the US, you have to sign a contract to get service, or pay a much higher rate and deal with a very limited phone selection (and I think you still end up signing some sort of implied contract). Verizon is the only provider in my area that has any sort of coverage once you get over the mountain, so that's what I have to use. I really don't want to move to an area with more carriers, so this is the choice I make. Once they get you in the contract (which has a lot of fine print that is hard to read when the customer service rep is wearing a tight low-cut dress), they tend to get a little more restrictive.

From the Customer Agreement:

Your Wireless Phone
Your wireless phone is any device you use to receive our wireless voice or data service. It must comply with Federal Communications Commission regulations and be compatible with our network and your calling plan. Whether you buy your wireless phone from us or someone else is entirely your choice. At times we may change your wireless phone's software or programming remotely and without notice. This could affect data you've stored on, or the way you've programmed, your wireless phone. Your wireless phone may also contain software that prevents it from being used with any other company's wireless service, even if it's no longer used to receive our service.

In the US, contract law trumps civil law. Besides, they'll just tell you to go somewhere else if you don't like it (they make $175 if you cancel the contract after the 15 day trial period).

I recently picked up a VX-9800 because I was looking for an all in one phone. I looked at the vcast services an thought they were nothing more than a marketing gimic to get press, but I tried it anyway (VZW always allows a 15 day trial period). Of course, they haven't upgraded the towers in my area, so it doesn't work. Still, I don't think I would bother with downloading music (or anything else) to it over their network. I have a 1 gig mini-SD card that will hold all my own content, already paid for.

Now if I can figure out a way to (easily) get .mp4 video on the thing from my cable box, I'll be all set. :)

Re:Why do you put up with this shit?

[WhiteWolf666]

Shop around.

There are great mobile deals to be had in the U.S., but they require you to shop around, and they require you to sign contracts.

My current deal?

I just signed up with T-mobile for a Motorola V330. The phone was free, and they paid me a $100 sign-up bonus (Amazon.com). I'm on a $45.99 a month contract, with 1500 minutes included, nights/weekends free, and T-mobile to T-mobile free.

I pay an addition $19.99 for unlimited EDGE Gprs service. My monthly bill comes to about $70.00, which I feel is pretty good for the number of minutes, and the unlimited internet access. I use approximately 2000 minutes a month, with heavy emphasis on nights and mobile-to-mobile. I use ~40 megs per month of date transfer.

For me, that averages about .025 USD per minute, and .000488037109 USD per kilobyte. Both of these are substantially cheaper than any plan I've found in Europe (just got back for a 2 month Europe trip, visted France, UK, Netherlands, and Spain).

It's all about usage patterns. In Europe, you'll pay substantially less than an average American if you control your usage. In the U.S., you'll pay an incredible rate if you have a very high consumption level.

Where Europe generally shines is on the high-end services. The only 3G option we have here at the moment is EVDO, which is fairly expensive, and requires you to sign with Verizon, whom I hate. Given the European pricing structures, however, and government backed loans to the mobile operators, it makes financial sense for them to offer these services, while American operates attempt to make as much money off their existing equipment as possible.

The nice thing about this from our perspective is that we tend to get better tested systems when they finally do release them. Every EVDO subscriber I've talked to has been pretty thrilled, if mainly because the system was well worked over in Japan and S. Korea before it came over here.

I imagine that T-Mobile's European experiments with 3G will enable them to build a fantastic system over here when they get round to it.

The crappy part is the obvious part; Europeans (and S.E. Asians) get better equipment substantially faster, and have a wider diversity of phones avaliable.

Again, this makes sense; the American consumer expects their phone to be free, so we aren't gonna get the best phones, we're going to get the bottom of the barrel. I'm not particularly happy with my V330, but I didn't have a Nokia option avaliable with Bluetooth, EDGE, and a moderately okay camera. Someday, I will; and then I'll be paying less per minute and KByte than the average European phone customer. But I've got to wait longer :(

P.S. Oh, wanna tip for being able to transfer your American phones from carrier to carrier? At least with GSM?

Calll your carrier before you cancel. Tell them you are going to travel to Europe, and you want your phone SIM-unlocked for a Pay-as-You-Go plan for Europe. You'll read them your IMEI number, and they'll e-mail you within 48 hours the SIM unlock code. I've successfully done this with Cingular and T-mobile. If they give you any trouble, tell them your friend with whom you are travelling with did the same thing last week.

Re:Why do you put up with this shit?

[arth1]

When comparing per-minute prices for US and a country like, say, Finland, don't forget that in the US you pay per-minute prices also for incoming calls, which, if you terminate as many calls as you originate, means the actual cost is twice as high.

As for 1000-minute-per-month plans, who in their right minds spend that much time on a phone? If you do, and it's not for work (who'd pay for your phone anyhow), I'd say you have an abnormal unsatiated need for human contact, and might want to consider talking to someone professional. Face to face, that is.

Regards,
--
*Art

Re:Why do you put up with this shit?

[jitterysquid]

In the US, after taxes, I was paying $45/month for 1000 minutes, and I got to keep unused minutes.

This is false value. Unless you are using every one of those 1000 minutes every month, the fact that you get to keep them into the next month is only helpful to smooth out monthly variants in your minute usage. You cannot cash them out, nor do they do you any good when you stop paying $45 per month to your provider. Even if you assume that you will stay with said provider forever and the plan will never change you will merely be accruing minutes for the off chance that you dramatically increase your usage.

US cell phone companies have optimized so heavily for the median customer (~1000 minute/month usage and needs a subsidized phone to defray startup costs) that they totally screw the outliers. My wife and I use ~400 minutes per year. I would kill a kitten for a workable system like Finland's. As it is we use prepaid service here, which I am mostly happy with except that I would like to have the option of prepaying for data service.

Oh well, I can't see anything changing here anytime soon. Long live the corporations and service so terrible they have to lock you in to keep you as a "customer".

Re:Why do you put up with this shit?

[pintomp3]

perhaps the average /.er has noone to talk offline, but half an hour a day is not a crazy amount of time to to be on the phone. on top of that, a lot of people use their cell phones instead of paying long distance charges on their landline. also, most people people pay for their own phone, not work. many carry two, one work and another personal.

Re:Why do you put up with this shit?

[NotoriousQ]

It is not an even comparison there too.

For example, most companies in the US do not meter any calls made entirely on their network, even during peak times, plus they all nights and weekends are not metered as well.

I have recently signed up for a 2-year contract with South Pacific Railway International (SPRInt) for the whole family, For about $60 a month, I have received 3 new phones, 800 minutes (metered during the day incoming and outgoing) shared between the phones, free weekends and nights to anywhere in the US, and free calls to anyone on SPRINT (including all members of the family). We only end up metering 500 minutes a month, with total talk time of about 2500-3500 minutes (3 people incoming and outgoing).

So for about $20 US/month/person, I never think about the prices when I call on the phone. That is what I call a good deal. However, our phones are locked in, and play mp3 files for $4 a track, and new wallpapers are downloadable for about $2 a piece. Guess what we do: we do not download wallpapers or play mp3s on the cell phones.

seems to be a firmware issue?

[zegebbers]

Is it possible to downgrade the firmware to pre v05 so that you can play mp3s still ?

Re:seems to be a firmware issue?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but I believe if you complain to them, they will give you a previous version of the phone... they don't advertise about that because it's in the deal with Microsoft.

So go to their (Verison's) website and/or talk to a service rep or something about it. Tell them your phone is broken; it won't play mp3s anymore. They'll probly fix you right up, but who knows?

Conversion != Playback

[robbieduncan]

Converting MP3 to WMA does not mean that these phones are capable of playing MP3s. This is just like Sony's portable audio devices only playing ATRAC (yes I know they've fixed this now).

Re:Conversion != Playback

[Anonymous Coward]

Please read the damn article. You might find that the phones USED to play MP3 fine with version V04 of the firmware, but with V05 and above it has been intentionally disabled.

Re:Fuck M$

[EvilNTUser]

"Yet again Micro$oft fucks the computing public."

More like the public fucks itself. This wouldn't even be an issue unless everyone in the US accepted the thought of phones as something the carrier provides.

Microsoft is indeed evil for asking, but this is as stupid as allowing your ISP to force you to use computers and software they provide, yet no one seems to be bothered enough to do something about it. You get what you deserve.

Reverse engineers..

[Travoltus]

start your engines!

Preferably in another country, that is. We wouldn't want anyone being being sent to Guantanamo as a terrorist for the crime of enabling Americans to upload music to Vcast on their own terms...

Conversion on Mac & Linux

[rvw]

This conversion, however, is not available for phones on Mac or Linux, leaving these customers unable to play MP3s.

Mac and Linux users can convert mp3's to WMA on their computer first before playing it on their phone, not? But I suppose Mac and Linux users will make other choices in general, and thus won't buy this phone.

Not a good idea

[Skrekkur]

I would think that just converting mp3 into wma is a generally bad idea, since the sound is guaranteed only to get worse, as things most often do when converting from a lossy compression to another. make world

Re:Fuck M$

[Professor_UNIX]

This wouldn't even be an issue unless everyone in the US accepted the thought of phones as something the carrier provides.

Even if you didn't have to buy a new phone when switching carriers they'd still probably cripple it with their own software version as soon as you connect to their network whether you want it or not. If it isn't an automatic upload then they'll simply say you can't use that phone on the network until you take it in and have the firmware updated to an authorized version to prevent "hacking" or some other nonsense argument. In the end we all know it's really about profit more than anything.

In fact, a really bad idea

[murderlegendre]

You're quite correct. The big problem is caused by the fact that MP3 uses more than just simple compression, it takes advantage of various psychoaccoustic phenomena to (in a sense) trick the brain into hearing soemthing that isn't quite what it seems to be. The conversion to WMA isn't a particularly intelligent process - in fact, I'll go out on a limb and conjecture that the MP3 is first decompressed to a PCM stream, then the PCM stream is re-encoded as WMA. Since WMA is not prepared for the trickery (it's all still there, just without the compression), it parses it all like basic musical signal - totally oblivious of any existing pre/de-emphasis, phase shift, etc.

I've only experimented with convering a few MP3 to WMA, but the results always sounded odd and occasionally downright glitchy. To draw a comparison - I suspect that MP3->WMA to my ears would be very much like replicated sushi to my palate (USS Enterprise - Captain Kirk era, when transporters could still make evil twins).

VCast not required

[Monad is Missing]

It is still possible to just hook a USB cable and copy MP3s to the phone, and play them. At least it is for me and my Verizon LG-VX8100.

Re:VCast not required

[dean.collins]

I just dont get it, I've been playing mp3's and transferring them between my computer and my phone via usb for 18 months....the answer is a Palm treo 600. have a nice day :) Dean

Netgear, Skype developing Wi-Fi phone

[luh3417]

This will soon make cell phones obsolete. Serves the greedy marketing-driven cell companies right. If only the Netgear-Skype wifi phone would play mp3's too. No greedy cell phone companies to stop them from adding that feature... http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/01/05/73605_HN netgearskypephone_1.html?source=rss&url=http://www .infoworld.com/article/06/01/05/73605_HNnetgearsky pephone_1.html

Re:Netgear, Skype developing Wi-Fi phone

[g0hare]

You obviously live in a big-ass city. 99% of everybody is NOT within a constant wi-fi signal.

Re:Fuck M$

[einexile]

(Real flamebait there, stating the obvious about a company most people find either loathesome or embarrassing. To say nothing of the readership here. That'll teach him not to start the thread with a tired joke.)

Be thankful the DRM effort is spearheaded by folks who haven't a clue how creepy their dystopian jargon sounds to everyday people. Biggest installed userbase for anything since the internal combustion engine, and they haven't figured out that consumers who have the time and patience for this will devote them to something else.

License migration, for Christ's sake. I want to listen to music on my cellphone.

That MS even cares about your phone demonstrates that their efforts remain comfortably misdirected. Surely the next step in this terrifying slippery slope is to crack down on the games we have installed on our iPods.

Heavens.

Or maybe I'm just one of those consumers directing his time and patience to something else, and this trojan horse will live to bite us all on the ass - just in time, I'm sure, for no one to remember what cellphones and iPods were.

I realize this is a concept for cell providers...

[HangingChad]

...but how about phones that make better phone calls? Instead of trying to add world + dog features to my phone that just junk it up.

Some of the extra features are handy at times. Text messaging isn't fast but it's convenient here and there. Camera is a cute toy but I never use mine.

I wonder how many consumers really want to use their phone as an mp3 player anyway? Or watching TV? Not me, but that's not necessarily reflective of the wider market.

Re:Captain Obvious here

[TallMatthew]

Plain and simple, they want you to use Windows. If they supported other OSes, then you'd have choice. The only choice Microsoft wants you to have is the one between XP Home or XP Pro.

Well, yeah, but it's equally relevant that there's no DRM with MP3s. Microsoft and Verizon are Big Businesses (TM). They can't afford to tick off the Powers That Be (TM).

It's sad that the music industry didn't get behind digital delivery before things got out of hand. DRM makes a certain amount of sense ... but it's way too late. If they had made their catalogs available digitally pre-Napster, consumers might have become accustomed to it and they might have gotten it to work, but at that point they were so consumed with protecting their CD margins that their window of opportunity closed.

Now they're screwed, everything's free if you know what you're doing, and we all get to suffer their litigation. Just another example of corporate greed doing no one any good, including the corporation itself.

Bring on the apologists!

Did you read teh EULA?

[nurb432]

They retain the right to change services and costs as they feel fit. When they feel fit to do it.

Sounds like its time to choose another provider and vote with your pocketbook.

False Advertising...

[Sr. Pato]

Why call it an MP3 Phone, if it doesn't play MP3s?

That's like KFC advertising Big Macs but giving you a piece of chicken...
... It's still food, just not the food you wanted.

Re:FLAC

[typan]

I don't know if it has to do with audiophile quality as much as for people who store music at home in FLAC, maintaing a seperate MP3 (or whatever) collection for portables is a pain in the ass. With storage as cheap as it is, is it really that crazy to say "I just want to go with FLAC on everything"? Same thing with this phone really. Converting to WMA is just a pain in the ass. I first thought they had a good idea with this (that is, if you like the idea of a MP3 plyaer/phone combo, which many here do not) but adding the WMA conversion makes it just another product to sigh at.

Makes me glad I hacked my E815.

[TellarHK]

About two months ago I was deciding whether or not to get a RAZR or an E815 through Verizon, as I didn't have much of a choice in carriers. It took a short while, but I eventually decided to go with the E815, because it was more easily known to be a moddable phone. Unlocked using relatively easy instructions found online, I was able to get it working to play MP3's just fine as ringtones or whatever. Also enabled basic OBEX and DUN over Bluetooth, though none of the 'push' features. Once unlocked, the phone becomes a lot more useful to people with non-Windows systems, though you do need a USB cable and some special software (that isn't difficult to find) to hex-edit the phone in order to free things up.

I figure this kind of modification is perfectly legitimate, as it doesn't take anything away from Verizon that they're obligated to. Any time I spend on the net with the phone uses minutes, and any feature I unlocked simply enables me to use the handset with -my- other electronics. I do wish Verizon would stop this crap and start offering services like the rest of the world can get them, but so long as they'll lock things down, we'll try and unlock them.

Email them

[XB-70]

If you want something done, start contacting Verizon and make some noise.
Here: Mark Marchand, Director, Media Relations, (518) 396-1080
Email: mailto:mark.a.marchand@verizon.com
Also, contact your government representative and make some noise there too. This sort of thing is going on way, way too much - if we make ourselves annoying as hell to deal with, they will take notice.