Razr Hell

I cannot emphasize how much I cannot stand this phone anymore. At first, it was beautiful. It had a better camera and was quite stylish to use. Best yet: it was easy to sync up with my MacBook via Bluetooth. Excellent.

That is, until I started playing around with my own mp3 ringtones.

I quickly found out that to get a ringtone onto my razr (a V3m from Sprint, USA - CDMA) phone, all I had to do was upload it to the \audio\ directory and then set the phone to use that as it's ring tone.

Excellent! In a test, I uploaded "My World Down" from the Animation Beck OST. However, I did that a year or so ago now... I've since got a few complaints that the ringtone sounds like a failing HDD and my co-workers freak out each time they hear it. I was getting a little tired of it too, and the ring tone was the full song (around 3 minutes) and over 2 MB, taking up a lot of space on the phone.

So, I decided to delete the mp3 from my razr. Simple enough, right? Just go in through bluetooth and delete the file like I do with the photos.

I keep getting an error, "Operation failed" each time I try to delete the file. There also seems to be no area of the phone itself where I can delete the ringtone. It doesn't show up in the "Ringtones" section of the phone, but it is listed as a ringtone. But, in the "assign a ringtone" section, I cannot delete ringtones. Frustrated, I tried connecting the phone via USB. No luck at all.

After doing some google searching, it seems that the Razr phones will do this to a lot of people. Requiring one to set the phone to silent, load it up as a USB disk drive, go into the "audio" subdirectory, delete two *.db files, and restart before deleting the MP3 can be done. --Getting it to load as a disk drive isn't bad, but I'll also have to use a special "razr explorer" app to view *all* the files on the phone. ~sigh. Okay, whatever... I'll follow the directions and do this.

Well, it didn't turn out so easy. First, the Mac directions won't work on a Razr V3m Sprint CDMA phone. Okay, what's next: using "hack the razr" to do it via USB in Windows XP. No prob, fire up XP in Parallels and we'll be all set. Parallels for some reason tonight freaks out my Mac however. Eating RAM and CPU like nothing else.

So, I'll just grab the link from Firefox and email it to myself and reboot the Mac into Windows XP (boot camp) and we'll go from there. Well, that's when I found out Firefox had freaked out after Parallels used up so much of the system resources. Took some time, but Firefox eventually came back to me. I quickly grabbed the link, pasted it into an email and sent it off, and restarted the Mac into XP.

Once in XP, I found the site really well laid out. Including video examples. Nice! I did exactly what they said, and loaded my phone into the system. Took a while to do everything just so, but it was going well. Drivers successfully loaded all I had to do was plug the phone in and wait for Windows to see it.

Apparently, Windows can't load the correct device drivers and it displays a message, "An error occured... Yadda yadda yadda... Device might not work." Great. Well, Hack the Razr says that I can get the most recent drivers from MotoDev, okay, no problem.

Registration required. Crap. At least it's free. Okay, do that. Signing away my identity again (*garbage in, garbage out*) and logged in. Downloaded the drivers, only to find that the device still won't work. Great, I can't even get the first and most critical step done. Grrrrr.

By now, I've spent over an hour and a half working on this dang phone, just to DELETE A SINGLE RINGTONE!!! I was so enraged, I was willing to just stomp on the phone to be done with it. ~sigh... This happens, lets try Bluetooth in Windows, maybe that'll have better luck... No dice. Bluetooth in Windows is even more shitty than Bluetooth in Mac OS X. Okay, well, the *.db files are probably hidden files, so how about using Onyx on OS X to view hidden files and connect via Bluetooth to delete the files. No dice once again. Too frustrated to continue on, I shut the phone and Mac off and decide that I'll just have to live with the ringtone until I get up the desire to get peeved by it again.