Customizing the Sprint/Samsung A900
I recently upgraded my Sprint PCS Wireless cell phone to the Samsung A900. To be honest, it was for no other reason than some of my friends had recently picked up a Motorola RAZR. I previously had a Sanyo PM-8200, which wasn't really a bad phone. Once in hand, as I'm sure is the case for many of us, I started looking at ways to customize it.
Note that I'm staying with Sprint simply because I'm still within my previous two-year agreement (induced by changing my billing plan), but beyond the typical eighteen months that would allow me a sizable discount on new equipment. It's a $200 penalty for getting out of the agreement. It's worth noting that this practice of service contracts for getting a better pricing plan is worthy of regulatory investigation, in my opinion. I can think of no other industry where they can get away with telling you, "In order to get the better price, you have to agree to stay with us for two years." Cable TV isn't even that bad.
First of course, you look to get rid of all the annoying default settings. Rainbow colors and happy-campy polyphonic ring tones are not my cup of tea. The A900 comes with enough preloaded options to adequately customize to your liking.
Beyond that, the carriers like Sprint obviously want you to spend a few bucks on custom Screen Savers (wallpapers) and ring tones - so they don't make customization all that easy. In addition, I'm not a big fan of Sprint's selection of any of these. They seem to focus on current movie marketing (to appeal to people with no creativity), bikini clad women (to appeal to high school boys), teeny bopper celebrities (to appeal to high school girls), or Walt Disney characters (to appeal to women clinging on to their youth). I'm none of these, so I'll need to make my own.
The process is actually pretty simple if you can work your way through the photo editor of your choice. All you simply need to do is size an image into the resolution of 320x240 at 72dpi. When saving, save it to a JPEG (.jpg) file with progressive compression and filtering turned off. You can use modest standard compression if you like.
IMPORTANT: You may wish to download and install drivers (use the .EXE file included in the ZIP). You'll need to do this prior to connecting the phone for the first time. The driver is to handle other features, such as the modem capability. Note that these drivers are not correctly listed in the Sprint manual. They are also not easily located from any Samsung website.
After that, connect your phone via USB. In your phone's tool's menu, go into the "Tools" menu, and select mass Storage. You'll then enable this to allow your computer to see the phone as a removable drive. This worked on Windows XP, but would likely also work in other Operating Systems. Simply copy the image to the directory under the DCIM folder. On my phone, this is called 100SSMED. Alternatively, you could send the message via E-mail or whatever, but you'll likely incur a charge.
From that point, you can go into your Display/Screen Saver settings and select the uploaded image from your "My Albums" entry.
Using the connect via USB method above, you can also copy some MP3 files to your mass storage in the "Media" directory. The phone's "Media Player" will find this content also.
Syndication