Cyn Armistead

TechnoMom's Place

Geekery, Kvetching

Boo, Motorola!

Cyn

Maybe I’m just spoiled from years of Nokia phones, and being able to just down­load the Nokia Phone Suite free from their web­site to sync my phone and PC, or put ring­tones and pho­tos on the phone. But hon­est­ly, I find it absolute­ly ridicu­lous that Motoro­la wants me to pay them $30 to $40 for the equiv­a­lent soft­ware to work with their phones!

It does­n’t, as far as I can see, do any­thing more than what the Nokia soft­ware does. They sell plen­ty of phones, and it can­not be that unusu­al for peo­ple to want to back up the data on them. So why are they goug­ing cus­tomers this way?

I can see charg­ing some amount if the cus­tomer wants a CD with the soft­ware on it mailed out, but charg­ing for the down­load is ridiculous.

And when I try to reg­is­ter for an account on their sup­port site, I keep get­ting error mes­sages say­ing that my email address is invalid. I tried a bunch of dif­fer­ent address­es, even the ISP address that I nev­er, ever use—no joy.

I can’t reg­is­ter the phone, either, because you have to pick your mobile provider, and mine isn’t list­ed, and there isn’t an “oth­er” option.

Boo!

Cyn is Katie's mom, Esther's Mémé, and a Support Engineer. She lives in the Atlanta area with her life partner, Rick, and their critters. She knits, does counted-thread needlework, reads, makes music, plays TTRPGs, and spends too much time online.
Website http://technomom.com/
Posts created 4253

9 thoughts on “Boo, Motorola!”

  1. I end­ed up pirat­ing that soft­ware for a friend’s phone, and it works fine. Want me to see if I can find you a copy?
  2. What pos­sessed you to move away from Nokia in the first place?!

    Yours incred­u­lous­ly,
    Ardent Nokia Pros­e­lyte (with good reason!)

  3. If it’s a RAZR, you might try mod­my­mo­to and hack­ther­azr for advice. I fig­ured out how to add mp3 ring­tones to my Sprint RAZR V3m with­out their sil­ly soft­ware kit, but I don’t remem­ber exact­ly how. It involved get­ting Motoro­la’s firmware update soft­ware and a few oth­er bits of soft­ware too.
  5. My Nokia died, but we had it insured. The insur­ance com­pa­ny did­n’t have any Nokias avail­able — the pol­i­cy did­n’t actu­al­ly pro­vide for the same phone, just an equiv­a­lent one. “Equiv­a­lent” is pret­ty loose, obvi­ous­ly. The choice was between the Motoro­la W385 and some Sam­sung mod­el that has ter­ri­ble reviews, so we took the Motoro­la. The rest of our phones are Nokias (the ones we bought).

    Thanks, Ben, I’ll look at those sites — I think I saw some ver­biage on Motoro­la’s site claim­ing that the W385 was designed based on the Razr.

    Art, our provider is MetroPCS.

  6. It looks like Ben, who I sort-of-know from a dif­fer­ent life, is point­ing you in much the same direc­tion I would (I hit refresh before post­ing, real­ly!). I’ve actu­al­ly done it myself before, and still have the rel­e­vant soft­ware for my RAZR at home.

    As for MetroPCS: that is a good thing, since the place I was wor­ried about was Ver­i­zon, who lock down their hand­sets so hard even Motoro­la’s offi­cial soft­ware has trouble.

  7. Okay, I found one thing amid a whole bunch of fake-blogs. This thread seems com­pre­hen­sive, if requir­ing a bit of read­ing to glean the appro­pri­ate bits. Part­way through the com­ment is made that these things did work for at least one W385 per­son on MetroPCS.
  8. Thanks, Art! You’re such a sweet­ie :-) Between you and Lib­bet I think I have it, now.
  9. In my opin­ion nokia are much bet­ter than motoro­la but this is up to you.

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