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?

[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.)

seems to be a firmware issue?

[zegebbers]

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

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