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?

[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

seems to be a firmware issue?

[zegebbers]

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

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: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...

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

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.

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: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.

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!

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.

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.