I’ve had a Motorola V3 RAZR phone for a while now, and being the geek that I am, I’ve always been interested in the more technical aspects of the phone, such as file transfers, Bluetooth connectivity, and custom-made ring tones (not the ones you buy, but the ones you can make yourself).
I’ve always known that this phone supports that sort of stuff, but it’s been hard to find information on it. For instance, it turns out that although you can find the USB cable needed to hook the phone up to your computer, you cannot transfer pictures, movies, music, or contacts to/from the phone without special software from Motorola (the “Motorola Phone Tools” suite or some such nonsense). And of course, that software is not available for free – you have to buy it (along with the cable) from Motorola.
I got a chance to check out that software once, but it seemed awfully buggy – the program would hang at times when accessing the phone, and you’d have to reboot the entire computer to get the connection to work again. It just seemed like a half-complete piece of software – something that needed a bit more polish (and a whole lot of QA testing) before releasing it for sale. (If it was a free download I could possibly excuse the poor performance.) So needless to say, I never forked out the cash for that program (or the cable), and therefore was never able to do some neat things with my phone.
Now, not too long ago I finally picked up a Bluetooth dongle for my PC. I had intended to just use it as a way to get more use out of my Bluetooth headset – using it for both my cell phone and my Internet telephony on my computer. Although that did work (mostly – the connection was full of static at times), I discovered something called “OBEX File Transfer,” which is apparently a way of connecting with Bluetooth-enabled phones.
Much to my surprise, it worked surprisingly well! Better, in fact, than Motorola’s own phone software! I could now transfer the pictures I’d taken on my phone to my computer in a few seconds, and upload short MP3 files to my phone to use as ring tones. After looking around a bit more, I even discovered that I could send contact items directly to my phone – neat!
So, long story short, it turns out that if you want to connect to a Motorola V3 RAZR phone (and probably the entire RAZR line, but the V3 is all I have), use Bluetooth, not USB.
Go figure!
