Flutterby™! : Cell Phone Gadget Nirvana

I've been very happy with the coverage and service from Verizon over the past two years, so when they sent me some 'customer loyalty' coupons/discounts on a new phone, I looked at their website and realized I wanted to see some in person. So today I swung by their store outside the mall and played a bit. Picked out the LG VX8100 with Bluetooth, 1.3mpx Camera, "Vcast", MiniSD card, etc.. with a value pack that included a Car Charger and Jabra Stereo/mic headset. And bought a Motorola Bluetooh headset. I picked a new service plan offering for less $ and more time/features.. and then started to play. :)

Considering this is not one of the PDA Phones, I'm impressed. Got it surfing the web and doing POP/SMTP e-mail off of my server pretty quickly, it's got the normal PIM functions, Calendar, etc.. (that I never use) and one Suprise Feature: No-where on the box did it say MP3 player, and the documentation says nothing about the ability to play MP3's, yet the buttons on the outside front cover of the phone seem to imply such functionality. I bought a 1GB MiniSD card for it, copies some MP3's to it. Yet when I tried the play button, it kept coming up 'no music available'. I played with the phone a bunch more, even took a couple of pics and saved them to the SD card (ugh, camera phone pics suck) to make sure it was reading the SD card. Put the SD card into my laptop, and the phone made 3 directories: my_pix,my_flix,my_sounds. I tried putting an MP3 into each directory.. no luck, still got 'no music available'. So I made a directory on the card named 'my_mp3' and put MP3's into it. - Poof! Plugged card back into my phone and it when I hit the play button a play list popped up of the files I put in the MiniSD card, hit play again and this sucky bad music comes out of the phone, plug in the Jabra headset.. WOW! They sound very good, very listenable. and there is a kewl eye candy visualizer on the screens.

It was obvious when I bought the it would do streaming video and music on demand via Verizon's pay extra VCAST service, and several cellphone websites list in the specs that the phone would do MP3s.. but not 'how'. As I start digging online, seems there is a plethoria of hacks for this phone to enable features not enabled in the default phone config from Verizon. So.. I'm a very happy gadget addicted geek and just had to share.