A brief Verizon Wireless rant

So, I got a new phone a few months back. It's the LG 'enV2'. Nice phone. Not quite a smartphone, but a few steps up from what we were using.

It's got a QWERTY keyboard, takes pictures and movies and all that, and is a music player.

It's that last bit I'm going to complain about.


I'm attempting to use the phone as my new 'iPod', as the LCD on my old one went a long time ago. I first started loading up my wife's phone with some songs. Not a lot, let's say around 400. Just to test the waters.

OK, so I dump the files on to the memory card and load it into the phone.

First complaint: Why on this sweet chocolate earth do all of the files have to reside in the same directory on the card? Why? The phone obviously understands the concept of directories, as the videos are kept in a different folder than the music, so on and so forth. You're telling me that here we are, in 2008, and you still have to lump all of the files in one spot?

OK. So, let's say I look past that. (Which I don't, but we'll move on.)

I go to check out the music on the phone. At a brief glance, it looks OK. The album art appears to be there, the albums appear to be there. Of course, if everything was copasetic, this post wouldn't be continuing.

Interesting that Firefox's spell checker doesn't know the word 'copasetic'.

As I was saying, things were not all right. One of the albums wouldn't show the album art. A couple of albums only had one song in them.

Grr.

So, the album art issue was due to the artwork embedded in the MP3 being too big. OK. It was 86K. Stupid, but I'll allow it. For real.

The songs not being there? Not cool.

After digging around on HowardForums, it appears that the issue was due to the file names of the MP3s being too long.

Really?!

I mean really?

You've got to be kidding me.


I popped the memory card out and took a look. Near as I can tell, when a file name was too long, the phone software truncated it to what it liked. However, if other files would truncate to that same name, the jig was up.


Now Verizon has more than high school co-ops working on this. At least I hope so.

C'mon. What the heck?
I can't name my file 'artist - album - track - songname'? And if I shoot for 'album - songname', and the album is too long, you're going to hose me on that?

Grr.

I know why you lock down the phone now. It's so people don't replace your crappy nff software.