Working with the e815 and photos – oy vey

(Updated 1/25/07 on MicroSD)

After a couple of weeks with my Verizon/Motorola e815, I have a few quirks and quibbles to report. Getting photos off the phone has been a mildly trying exercise since Verizon crippled the Bluetooth profile that would allow one to effortlessly and wirelessly move snapshots into iPhoto. You can upload photos to vzwpix.com, but once there they can be viewed and emailed but not downloaded (dragging and dropping a photo from the web site leaves you with a low resolution version of the image). So, okay, email — you can email from the phone or the web site a “slide show” containing one to five pictures. I emailed myself a “slideshow” of one picture and was able to save the attached file as a photo and pull it into iPhoto at its full resolution (1280 by 1024 pixels). Given that the phone has no keyboard, typing email addresses is kind of a drag.

So, I bought a 128 mb transflash card for the phone. Actually, I believe it has been officially renamed“microSD.” This is a new and teeny-tiny flash memory card format, smaller than your fingernail, that fits in a slot in the top of the e815:

A simple menu setting lets you save photos to the card instead of to the phone’s own memory. When you want to move your new masterpieces over to your Mac, turn off the phone, carefully extract the memory card, seat it in its SD card adapter, put the adapter into a card reader, connect to a Mac and – shazam – you can import to iPhoto.

Why so carefully? In my first reaction review of the e815, I wondered why Verizon allowed one to move photos off the phone on a memory card but not with Bluetooth. The answer, it seems, is a warning that accompanies the card — due to delicate, small form factor the card is not meant to be removed and re-inserted frequently. The manufacturer, SanDisk, refers to the cards as “semi-removable.” Makes one wish he had waited for a higher capacity card (Update — larger capacity cards are everywhere in January 2007. Here’s a 1 GB MicroSD card for less than $16). It also makes one wonder how great an MP3 music player the phone would be if you can only change the music on your card infrequently.

Another pet peeve — while iSync on Tiger will synchronize phone numbers from your address book with the phone, it leaves email addresses off. This is mucho annoying as I just mentioned that typing addresses in with the numerical keypad is a pain. I’ll test some of the iSync alternatives and see if any do a better job.