Cool Mobile Phone Apps

July 3, 2004 10:47 PM

I am particularly fortunate to have two free services to choose from [1, 2] to send ringers and stuff to my phone without going through the manufacturer or service provider.

Are there any other services that provide similar solutions for other providers, or perhaps software to do such? Surely there have to be some clever geeks out there with other brands of phones/service.
posted by britain to Technology (9 answers total)

I don't know about services -- how the hell would some random server out there do file transfers and configuration on your phone? -- but I've had no trouble doing infrared file transfers to my S/E T616. In order to maximize the irritation I cause others, I copied the A Team theme song in MIDI format and set that as my ring. Do other phones not have support for standard file formats?

I suppose you could do the same thing with Bluetooth, but I haven't played with that.
posted by majick at 11:29 PM on July 3, 2004

As long as your phone has some sort of computer-connectivity mechanism (be it a cable, IR or bluetooth), you can almost certainly use (free) manufacturer-provided or (sometimes free) 3rd-party software to upload images, ringtones and apps/games direct to the phone.

The software suite will probably also include a program that converts standard midi files to ringtones, with or without a bit of fiddling about to make it work well with limited polyphony. Of course, with the most recent phones you can probably just bluetooth some mp3s to them or something.
(I did the same as majick, but with a Knight Rider midi.)

(You should probably look into this stuff for backing up your phoine data anyway, because you'll wish you had when your phone gets stolen or breaks.)
posted by cell at 1:44 AM on July 4, 2004

The Sony Ericssons are indeed the best for having standard filetypes - gifs, jpgs, and midi files. I can use bluetooth and infrared to upload to my T610.

As cell says, with the correct cable and software, you can do this easily from a PC. I have though, managed to upload some pictures to my brother's unconnected Nokia, by putting the correctly sized images onto my webspace, and then browsing to them using WAP on his phone. You can then set the picture as a background.
posted by viama at 2:42 AM on July 4, 2004

YMMV, but for Sprint PCS phones, files can be attached to messages, sent to the service number and then saved to the phone from the received message. I do this all the time to put pictures on my Nokia 6225.
posted by JollyWanker at 7:58 AM on July 4, 2004

I also vaguely remember having an ancient, bricklike Nokia of some kind, on Pacbell PCS (now Cingular GSM) which could have its ringtones programmed by sending it an SMS message formatted in a certain way. But I wasn't desperate enough to spend the 50c per try (or whatever SMS costs, sheesh, what a useless overpriced feature; hey phone people, ever heard of a protocol called SMTP?) to play with it, so for maximum obnoxiousness I set it to play Jingle Bells year round.
posted by majick at 8:56 AM on July 4, 2004

Indeed. I'm in the Nextel camp, upgrading from an i1000 (which was too dumb to do anything) to an i95cl -- their first color model, in the 'Condor' family.

There are two packages around, apparently, that do this sort of stuff. MyJAL appears to be, from what I can infer from web fora, a cracked version of Moto's own JAL-Lite, and everyone warns everyone else to stay away from it.

There's another package called WebJAL, which apparently doesn't suffer from those problems, and everyone likes it, modulo you apparently gotta install Apache/Win on your machine to run it. Whether it will run under Apache/Linux... I'll find out next week when the phone comes in. :-)

The Condor handsets support MIDI ringtones only; the newer Falcons (with 3-digit model numbers; the i730 and the like) also support WAV files.

And, damn, this is cool. Been away a while...
posted by baylink at 9:39 AM on July 4, 2004

I've used mbuzzy with success.

I can't seem to figure out how to delete them should I no longer want them, I have an LG5350 with Sprint PCS.
posted by geekyguy at 9:42 AM on July 4, 2004

I've been uploading images and ringtones to my Motorola v400 with 3GUpload, and it's been working pretty well for me thus far. When I initially signed up there was a onetime fee for six-month's access, but after that I could transfer whatever the hell I wanted. There might not even be a subscription fee anymore, for all I know.
posted by truex at 10:59 AM on July 4, 2004

3GUpload used to be free when I was doing the ringtone download thing, but it was only within the last two or three months that they instituted the one-time charge. It's like six dollars for a six month period, or twelve dollars for a year. The ringtones tend to be better quality than even some of the pay sites out there, so I would recommend checking it out.
posted by calistasm at 4:36 PM on July 4, 2004