7/22/2009

Samsung SGH-C270 / E1310 / E1310B

[Update July 16th, 2010]: The below also applies to Samsung E1310, which I had to buy after my C270 ended its life in my washing machine :-(

I just recently bought this “no frills” phone and I am very satisfied with it: it does what a phone should do, speaker is good, battery life excellent. The only thing I really dislike is the built-in ringtones and background images – yuck!

With a “normal” phone you would just get a cable and upload what you like to the phone. Not with this one! The data cable costs 2/3 of what the phone costs, and it is a serial cable. Yes, no typo, it is a serial cable. Who builds a phone in this age with a serial cable? Most laptops don’t even have a serial port any more!
And last but most important, this "data cable" can only be used for backing up/restoring the data on your phone. No kidding, you cannot transfer any data via the cable!

So no to the cable for capability, price and technology.

The Samsung site offers ringtones to download. Well, first of all I don’t like their choices, and second, when I go to their site using the phone, it does not work at all as described on their web site. It may well be that it is not intended to work.

Support was not able to help me either. But the phone has GPRS and a web browser, so … here is what you do:

  • find an mp3 file with the ring-tone of your choice (better choose a small one, the memory is limited, I think, to 400K)
  • upload it to a web site (there are so many free offers), remember the complete URL to the file
  • fire up the phone’s web browser and navigate to the URL (this may be cumbersome to enter, and you better check the spelling several times, but hey, you only have to do this once)
  • save the file and set it as your ring tone

No cost, no hassle. The same approach works for background images.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Oh, thank you for the warning about the data cable!
No buyer's remorse for me, that way;)

I still managed to transfer ringtones to my E1310B without even going online, via bluetooth and the OBEX protocol.

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