Just got a LG VX8300 (now what?)

I finally broke down and upgraded my phone. Phone seems good so far. Initial things I tried and my observations are below.

VCast - I got a 1 month promo for this. OK -- I still don't get it. Am I missing something? At most there looks to be just a few dozen tiny video clips, most of which I don't want to see. I tried a little newscast and a weather report... slightly useful but then not $15 a month useful. If I want to see Christina Aguilera wiggle her sexy (and tiny hard to see) body, I gotta pay extra for that one (no thanks). I would have thought that streaming video support would include countless TV shows, movies, etc. so where are they? I'm already bored of VCast after going through the choices for 1/2 an hour.

I paired my wife's Bluetooth headset that she NEVER used with my new phone. Good so far. It was fun trying to pair it because she lost the user manual.

I then tried other Bluetooth functionality. My Palm device has Bluetooth... just for fun, I tried to get them to talk to each other, nothing useful happened.

So then I tried bluetooth with my PC. I paired them, then I tried the "voice gateway" profile and was able to get the phone's audio to come out through the computer's speakers. Cool, although probably not too useful since phone has speakerphone.

Next, I tried using the phone as a bluetooth modem. My computer could see the phone support this, but it wouldn't dial for some reason. (Maybe I have to pay extra to Verizon for this? Didn't investigate further.)

Next, I wanted to see if the built-in functionality of the phone could handle transferring contact info to/from computer with bluetooth. I readily found a feature to send a single contact and that worked, although the number of gestures it took to make this happen was kind of much. I then tried to send a vCard file with 100+ contacts all at once to the phone; it gave an error. Its apparently only a 1-contact-at-a-time feature.

Then, I installed the latest BitPim. I was guessing that the USB cable (which I have but haven't unpacked yet) would be required to make this work, but I tried it with Bluetooth first. It didn't automatically detect the phone, but it did let me pick the phone manually. I imported that big vcard file into BitPim and was pleased when it sent all the contacts to the phone over Bluetooth. (I was told this could not be done.) The only glitch is that 1/2 of my contacts are company name contacts that have no first/last name, so it thinks all the companies are the same person and they all overwrote each other resulting in all the company contacts being lost. I fixed this by exporting the Palm Desktop to a CSV file instead of a vCard, then writing an Emacs script to rearrange the file so that any contact w/o a name used the company name in place of the full name; that worked, but its lame that I have to do this.

I took some pictures with the phone, then BitPim was happy to copy all of them at once over Bluetooth to my PC. I was also told this could not be done; proved them wrong. BitPim also let me look around the File System on the phone but I didn't modify anything.

I'm also curious if BitPim will let me send mp3's, video and pictures (for the gallery or the wallpaper) TO the phone over Bluetooth. Haven't tried these yet; anyone know if it'll work or is the USB cable required?

I also haven't tried the MP3 player features yet. I'm hoping that BitPim would let me transfer songs to the microSD card over Bluetooth, but people also are telling me that won't work. Anyone know for sure? If not Bluetooth, then will USB cable do this? Or, do I need to buy a little card reader and put the card into there and transfer using the PC to the reader?

Anything else I should be able to do that's useful but I may be forgetting?

Nice little writeup.

Do you have an SD card for it? If so you can store more pics on the phone or transfer stuff from your computer to the phone a little more easily. (music files) it's easier to get a sd card reader that uses USB than try and transfer things using bluetooth.

The card reader would be WAY faster too. It took a bit of time for the initial synchronization of BitPim with bluetooth. I can picture a few hundred megabytes of files taking a while with Bluetooth.

Oh, I just thought of another useful thing I should be able to do: what if I want to listen to the MP3's that I put into the phone while I'm in the car? Using speakerphone would be lousy! I have one of those ancient 5 year old car stereos that doesn't understand things like Bluetooth or audio input jacks, but I do have one of those fake cassette tapes that has the wire and 1/8" plug at the end for a makeshift audio input connection. What's the best way these days to connect a MP3 phone to an old car stereo? Some plug to convert from 2.5mm headset to 1/8"?

The leather case is rather strange. Besides fitting annoyingly tight, when its open the leather blocks the camera; I have to hold the leather down with a finger while taking a picture. Plus, the phone won't close all the way... open about 1/4" now. I'm hoping that'll improve as the case stretches. Oh, and its blocking the microSD port... how am I supposed to get the card out w/o pulling off the whole case?

More stuff to dig threw LG VX8300 Tips, Tricks, Tutorials, and Hacks: VX-8300 tutorials, mods, hacks, Bluetooth, microSD, tricks, videos, wallpapers and ringtones for the LG cell phone

Thanks, there's some helpful stuff there.

Today I tried the USB cable (the one that comes in the "music essentials kit"). I couldn't get BitPim to see it through the cable no matter what I did. Would not recognize that there was a phone there. Meanwhile, BitPim via Bluetooth still works. Although, today I got a microSD card and took some pictures on it. BitPim could not see the pictures that were on the microSD card, just in the main memory. Actually BitPim could sort of see the pics, but they showed up as 0 length files that I could do nothing with using BitPim. (Any ideas?)

I followed the instructions that came with the music essentials kit, and used Windows Media Player 10 and that USB cable to successfully transfer MP3's I made from my CD's, into the phone. Then, they played fine through the phone's speakers and through the earbuds. (It actually sounded pretty good just though the tiny speakers.) The graphical interfaces to do this seemed a bit dorky to me, but it worked. (I would have preferred that the phone simply appear as another drive in Windows Explorer that I then drag/drop whatever songs and pictures I want onto.)

So, at the moment one big hole in my plans is that I still haven't been able to get pictures from the phone's microSD card into my computer. BitPim is only able to do this from main memory which can't hold many pictures at all. I just got a universal card reader that I haven't tried yet with the microSD card... that's probably the way I gotta do it. I just wish this vx8300-specific case that the phone is in didn't block part of the microSD port! I have to take the case off the phone just to remove the memory card, which is why I was hoping that USB would do what I want.