Brian Sawyer

New Phone

You might have noticed that my posting on this site has become considerably less frequent and much less text-heavy when I actually do post. Unfortunately, the increased limits of my time have turned this page into a glorified photo blog, so I thought it was at least time to get a cameraphone to make it official.

But it turned out that finding a cameraphone that works with my computer was not as easy as I expected it to be. I didn’t want to invest in a data plan with my mobile service provider (to send pics via email, directly to Flickr or to this blog), which means I’d need to get the pictures off the phone by some other means of connecting my phone with my computer. But it seems that Nokia, Motorola, and the other usual suspects in the cell phone business just don’t make phones that work with Macs.

My quest required more than a few customer service calls with various manufacturers, the gist of which can perhaps best be summarized by the following composite exchange:

Me: So, is it true that the RAZR V3 won’t work with a Mac?

Motorola: None of our phones are compatible with the Macintosh operating system.

Me: Really? What about the ROKR?

Motorola: Oh yeah, that. Yes, that one works on Macs, but it’s our only phone that does.

Me: Hmm… that seems exceedingly odd to me. Given all the hoopla surrounding Motorola’s recent partnership with Apple, it doesn’t make sense to me that your company has made no attempt to make your products actually work with theirs.

Apple: Ahem.

Me: Okay, then. That’s all I wanted to know.

Long story short: though my phone refuses to speak my computer’s language, my Mac has ways of making it talk. So, if you see lower-resolution photos appearing on this site, you’ll know their source.