Into the Woods

After battling with Sprint store after Sprint store, I finally found some enterprising manager who would be flexible with the 30 days remaining in my contract and hook me up with the 150 phone instant rebate. After a bit of debate, I settled on the Samsung a920, a Bluetooth phone with EV-DO and a microSD slot for extra storage. The phone works really well as an MP3 player with the 1gig card I got from Microcenter for 60 bucks. The phone even has external MP3 controls..its great. The only problem I found was that there was no good way to populate the SD card with music from iTunes. So I hacked up a script that I called iDrop. Remove the .download file extension after you download the file. (I added this so your browser won’t try to run the script before you are ready)

To run it, simply highlight the playlist (in iTunes) whose files you want on your SD card and run the script by double-clicking on it. It will create a nice directory structure on the SD card in a directory specified in the script (most people will have to edit it). The only slight annoyance about the MP3 system in the phone is that it doesn’t understand M3U playlists. Rather, it has its own binary format. Thus, if you want playlists you have to create them manually on the phone (but its easy). Its a bit odd though, because in the section of the phone where you create playlists from downloaded music, they use M3U…the mind, as they say, boggles.

Finally, because my phone is EV-DO (the broadband mobile data network), I can’t get even a slow internet connection for free. However, for 39 bucks a month, I can get unlimitted highspeed internet…I’ll probably cave and get it.