Can you hear me now? If you can, you’d hear swearing.

I spent some time tonight playing around with my new RAZR V3m. I wanted to explore the full length and breadth of my new purchase. I was aware of modding forums and a fairly large community of gearhead nerds that enjoy that sort of thing, and I wanted to see what was involved.

I spent most of the night wrestling with some Motorola tools that I found out much later (hours later) that most of the features I was after had been disabled by Verizon “due to carrier request”. The carrier request in question is placed there purely to force Verizon customers to use Verizon’s network to transfer pictures and media to and from their phones. They have also intentionally cripped the Bluetooth features on most of their handsets, a fact that I was reminded of by our sales rep. He claimed it was for “security reasons”, an abject falsity uttered by a pure moron spouting a corporate line (yes, that’s exactly what I think, guys). Bluetooth requires that you authenticate with a PIN when you do pretty much any activity, and you have to tether yourself to the device you are transmitting to. There is very little inherently insecure about that.

ANYWAY, I was informed of this fact before I got my phone so I knew what I was getting into. Since the “straight-from-Motorola” software that should work with my phone doesn’t because of Verizon’s policies, I wanted to weigh my options in the modding community. I’ve decided not to do it. The path is too hard, too fraught with potential pitfalls including breaking my phone and voiding my warranty. I am pretty hard on my cell phones, so it is important that I retain the easy “take phone back to Verizon and get it fixed/replaced” warranty. If this first easy step was not going well, I can’t imagine how bad it would get before I got my phone unlocked and operating at full brilliant capacity. Knowing my luck with such things, the firmware upgrade would break and turn the phone into a pretty, thin, stylish brick.

I am buoyed by the fact that my new phone was the first model to take microSD memory, and there are no restrictions for copying to and from that (so sayeth the manual). Surprisingly, 512MB of this stuff only costs $15 (after Buy.com rebate) so I will soon be transferring stuff around as much as I want.

Take that, Verizon. I will use a feature you give me to get around an option you seek to disable.