yes, the letter g is wonderful... of course, and the number 6

i thought more about getting the treo 650 but the $549.99 price from sprint is just too much. i looked at what i do with my treo 600 and came to the conclusion that i don't really need a full pda phone anyway, i just need one that can maintain a calendar to alert me of appointments and sync with my computer. aside from prodiag, i don't use any palm-specific applications so i don't really care what operating system the phone uses (as long as it's not windows). a camera is nice, but the treo 600 has probably the worst camera on any phone so i'm sure anything else would be an upgrade so i don't really care what its specs are.

i looked at sprint's other phones and they're all shit. they have a dozen $20 omg-it's-my-first-cell-phone-ever ones and then 2 $500 pda phones with nothing decent in between. so i looked at some other carriers and did some research on the motorola razr v3 from cingular. slim and light, bluetooth, can sync its address book and calendar with isync, has a camera, and isn't too expensive. i've been a sprint customer for as long as i've had a cell phone (6 years?) and i didn't really want to switch, but sprint's current phone selection sucks. cingular has a 30 day trial so i can return the phone and get out of the contract if i don't like it.

i called sprint to see when my contract was up and they told me i was out of contract since april. i wasn't even aware i could have service without being in a contract. so yesterday i went to the cingular store on 14 and bought a black razr. i had them give me a new number that i can use during the trial and if i stay with them i will port my old number. for now i have my treo forwarding all calls to my new number.

i went to best buy down the street and used my gift card to buy a motorola bluetooth headset that clips on my ear. i probably won't use it much but i figured i might as well have one since the phone can use it.

when i got home the first thing i did was test the bluetooth because i'm fascinated by it. i paired the headset with the phone, and then the phone to my powerbook. i never looked at bluetooth before and didn't know how the security worked, but the pin code thing is kind of neat. once the phone was setup in the bluetooth panel in mac os, i added it to isync and pushed my calendar and address book to it.

one annoying thing i ran into was that for each recent event that i had in ical, the phone popped up an alert that i had to dismiss. like the phone suddenly realized that it forgot to tell me about the half dozen reminders i had setup for last week and figured it'd tell me about them now. however, one great thing about the sync process was that the phone just shows "synchronizing" in the top corner and continues to let you use the phone while it's doing its thing. in contrast to the treo where you'd have to watch the hotsync process take up the whole screen and not let you do anything.

once i was done testing bluetooth, i looked into modifications for the phone (as is my nature). i found motox.us and motomodders.net which had the tools and images to reflash the phone and do some other changes. they're all windows-only tools, so i sat down in the basement for a few hours with my phone hooked up to my windows machine, doing things through vnc from my powerbook. i reflashed the phone with a stock motorola image to remove the cingular crap which changed the menus and makes things a bit faster. i also replaced the motorola logos that show on the outside screen.

my next task was figuring out how to get the camera pictures off the phone, since isync wouldn't do anything with them. the bluetooth file exchange utility that comes with mac os did this nicely. i just tell it to browse a device, choose the phone, and get a list of directories and files on the phone. select "picture", then select files and click "get." very easy, but unfortunately not very automatable. i wanted to setup something like my treo_pics.pl script that i could automatically pull new images from the phone, rename them, and add them to cvs to make them show up on my site.

i looked into scripting with applescript and was able to get as far as opening the program, browsing to my phone, and selecting the "picture" directory, but i can't get any further. for some reason i can't script the bluetooth app as a normal app and have to send stuff to it with keyboard event hacks.

tell application "Bluetooth File Exchange"
activate
delay 1

tell application "System Events"
tell process "Bluetooth File Exchange"
keystroke "o" using {command down, shift down}

-- phone is highlighted, hit enter
keystroke (ASCII character 13)

-- wait for device and browsing window should come up
delay 7

tell window "Browsing..."
tell sheet 1
-- move down to 'picture'
keystroke (ASCII character 31)
end tell
end tell
end tell
end tell
end tell

the window doesn't allow keyboard navigation (an overall theme i'm getting more and more annoyed with in mac os) so i can't get inside the picture directory without being able to send a "double click" event (why can't i just hit enter?), which i can't seem to do in applescript.

i would much rather have a command-line tool to be able to copy files through obex, but i can't seem to find such a utility for mac os.