we're not in an infinity, we're in the suburbs

cingular announced the other day that they were starting to carry the motorola slvr phone. i've wanted this phone since i first saw it because it was just like my razr but thinner and in "candybar" form instead of a flip phone. so i called the cingular store in crystal lake and asked if they had any, but they weren't getting them in for 2 weeks.

being the impatient person that i am, i wanted the phone right away, so i found it at expansys. this was a non-us version, unlocked, for ~$300, which was the same price for the cingular version (without contract, since i'm already a customer) which was locked to cingular.

so i ordered the phone from expansys (their uk site) with overnight shipping. being the crafty people that they are, they rerouted the order to their us store, which happens to be in illinois. so i paid for overnight shipping when ground shipping probably would have got it to me in the same amount of time. oh well. they shipped it to me via ups and as always, ups left a stupid "infonotice" on my door telling me i had just wasted my money on overnight shipping because they were not going to give me my package until the next day after i had it rerouted somewhere else. again, being the impatient person that i am, i went home during lunch and grabbed the infonotice, called them up and told them to hold the package at their facility, and then went all the way out to palatine with adam after work to pick up my package.

after waiting around the shithole that is the ups hub in palatine for about an hour, i finally had my new phone in hand. while adam drove us back, i swapped the sim card out of my razr into the slvr and everything was working.

while playing around with the phone i learned that the phone did not have itunes, but "mp3 playback" via motorola's "digital audio player". i later learned that only the cingular phones sold in the us carry itunes and all other slvr phones sold worldwide do not. not that i really care either way, since i already have an ipod and itunes on the slvr is limited to 100 songs, but i was a bit disappointed to learn that something i was expecting was not there.

when i got home i tried to setup bluetooth between the phone and my powerbook. at this point i became even more disappointed when i discovered that mac os x does not recognize any of the bluetooth profiles on the slvr. luckily nova media provides a plugin for isync so the slvr is at least recognized via isync using usb. this allowed me to copy my calendar and contacts to the phone, but i still have no way of copying pictures from the phone or doing anything over bluetooth.

i've been poking around howardforums, motox, and motomodders looking for information on new firmware. so far i've seen a few reports from people saying the non-us versions don't work for them either in mac os x, but that the cingular version works fine. i really don't want to have to load a cingular branded firmware on my unlocked, unbranded phone (which would the complete opposite of what i did on my razr) but without bluetooth the phone kind of sucks.