Rant: 3rd-party solutions

So I was reading on-line about my new phone and others found something I learned a couple of days ago: the Nokia software package that came with it has been crippled by my service carrier.

One of the gimmicks is that you can customize its appearance. The software allows you to print your own faceplate and it generates a matching JPG wallpaper image so that the image remains "unbroken" even on the actual display screen when not in use.
But being a typical money-grubbing corporate entity, my carrier does not allow downloads to my phone unless the wallpapers and ringtones are directly from them (at $2 a pop). So the software package will not send my custom wallpaper to my phone.

...I have a picture of Superman from the waist down on the front of my partially custom phone. And the JPG that should've been his upper-body and face? It sits on my PC at home... a veritable digital orphan.

So it's GAME ON to hack my own damn phone.

So far, I won a Nokia USB cable off eBay for a crazy-ass $10USD (that includes shipping). And I found a software that'll let me browse my phone's memory like a folder in Windows... and copy my ringtones and wallpapers. Of course, at this point I'm so out of patience, this third-party will suffer the consequences of my carrier's greed. See, somebody's gonna regret their business philosophy - maybe not them but someone else.

I regularly use 3 handheld devices. All purchased within the last few years. All of them promising a big advancement in technology. They were all screwed by their own company.

First was my Palm-device. This doohickey promised to be a multimedia extravaganza with it's brilliantly clear display screen. Behold "Gmovie" - a defunct video converter/player that was not even supported by the hardware it came with!!
After crawling the back-alleys of the web, I finally found a product that did the same thing but that actually worked on my particular model. Naturally I refused to pay money for it. After all, I already paid for the ability to record and play videos on my device - it was part of the package price of purchasing my device to begin with.
It was like if I sold you a hamburger, but instead of giving you a burger patty, I give you a hotdog wiener. You've got a both a bun and a questionable-meat-product, but they just don't fit right. Now let's say you were to find a burger patty elsewhere, would you really want to pay for yet another questionable-meat-product?

Granted that's not a very good analogy because you could conceivably eat a burger bun and a wiener separately. But still, the point is that you thought you were buying a hamburger, but you didn't get one.

The other device is my PSP. Which, granted, after mucking around with it, did do what it promised (and all within legal means). But Sony certainly didn't make it very easy to show my videos. It plays only a certain video type formatted, named, and stored a certain way. Thank goodness for amateur efforts like PSPVideo9, a tiny little program that converts and saves the videos for you (even lets you choose widescreen or regular sizes, detects the USB for you!).

End rant here - I'm too tired for this.