Technically Complex

Remember my highly advanced yet broken and then replaced old-lady phone?

It seems to be handling the whole "inbound and outbound calls" process now, so I've moved on towards playing with testing the multimedia functionality for review purposes.

While I could connect via Bluetooth, I don't trust that weird wireless junk. Instead, I use a cable which has a USB plug on one end and a weird thing that looks kind of like a shovel that plugs into the phone.

I replaced my ringtone with a MIDI file of Madonna's Material Girl with no difficulty. You know. Just as a test. For science.

What bothers me about the whole process is that there is no Mac client for my phone. In order to move files on or off the device, I have to launch my virtual Windows machine from deep within the bowels of OS X.

But wait, it gets better:

Ok, so I start my laptop (careful to not plug in the phone before the virtual Windows starts, lest OS X freak right out and shut down) then launch the Windows Vista virtual machine, let it initialize through the part where it has access to the USB ports on the laptop, then I plug in the phone, launch the Samsung application, and drag files around like USB bandwidth is free. Oh, wait! It is free.

This phone will record video until the internal memory runs out, which is nice since I don't have to time the cool stuff to within a 15 second video. This limitation of my old phone left me with dozens of clips of nothing followed by an explanation of how awesome the next thing that happened was except I missed it while slogging through the stupid save/delete/send menu.

And I can take these videos off my phone and put them on the Vista desktop or whatever.

Windows Vista has no idea what to do with these video clips. The file format is not supported and (it is implied by the constantly launching Windows Vista Help Menu) I'm a pretty lousy person even for asking about it.

So, Windows Vista is the only way to access these files created on my phone -- Even though Windows Vista has no idea what they are.

You know what it turns out I can use to decode and playback and edit these clips?

The Mac.

Apparently, the weird phone video format is just fine as far as Apple Quicktime is concerned. I appreciate that.

This isn't a big deal, anyway. I can use Windows Vista to drag videos to Quicktime on the Mac itself. I just found it odd and needlessly complicated.

However, the only true issue remaining is in finding something worthy of video documentation and online presentation. It isn't like my workday is filled with a near-constant stream of ninja attacks and zombie invasions.

Whenever those happen I've generally left my phone on the charger anyway.