Which carriers don't cripple cell phones

[Mr. Adventure]

I need to get a new cell phone and after finding out the hard way that Verizon had crippled my Razr I'd like to find a provider that doesn't do this. Any advice would be appreciated, I'm not very knowledgable about cell phones.

 

[farmkid]

I have AT&T and my Razr is fully functional. Verizon is the only one that I know of that routinely cripples their phones.

 

[Chaos Descending]

AT&T does a little bit of crippling, but nothing whatsoever like Verizon. Verizon and Sprint do it a LOT.

AT&T has crippled my phone so that instead of using full MP3 songs as ring tones, they have to be no more than 64kbps sample rate and no more than 30 seconds long.

This means that I have to do some fucking around with my MP3s to use them as ring tones instead of just dropping them into my phone and running with it.

I have a RAZR V3xx.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I have AT&T and my Razr is fully functional. Verizon is the only one that I know of that routinely cripples their phones.

Why would they do something like that?

 

[Mr. Adventure]

I have AT&T and my Razr is fully functional. Verizon is the only one that I know of that routinely cripples their phones.

Why would they do something like that?

Money. So you have to pay to get the pictures off your phone instead of hooking it up to your PC, for example.

 

[farmkid]

I have AT&T and my Razr is fully functional. Verizon is the only one that I know of that routinely cripples their phones.

Why would they do something like that?

Money. So you have to pay to get the pictures off your phone instead of hooking it up to your PC, for example.

Precisely. If they disable communication with your PC, then every ringtone/picture/whatever else you want to transfer from one to the other has to go through their network and they can charge you for the privelege.

 

[RyanKCR]

T-Mobile doesn't cripple phones in that way. I work for them troubleshooting the BlackBerries and PDA's. Check them out.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Sprint doesn't seem to be too bad about it, so long as you get a phone that has a memory card. My wife has one of those Muziq phones. You can't use any of your songs as ringtones for some odd reason, but everything you put on the phone is on your memory card--which can easily be put into a PC, for transferring files back and forth. You can avoid buying your music through Sprint, for instance.

The 30-second ringtone limit is probably because that's as long as your phone will ring, before going to voicemail. Why would you need one longer, in that case?

 

[Gertch]

I have Verizon and my Venus came with the data cable. I routinely use BitPim to communicate with the filesystem of the phone.

So they don't cripple them all.