Introduction

PROS: a reasonable phone but won't replace the E815
CONS: greedy service provider who needs to be sued again so they clean up their act.
If you're reading this more than likely you either have the V860 or you want to get one. No hacking is required but doing what you want takes a little work.

Its unfortunate but the phone is heavily locked down. I plan on enabling the majority of the feature set. There is no way to unlock the phone but you can get reasonable access to some of the features.

The Quick Dying Battery

The battery time is great - until bluetooth. Bluetooth is the suck it down guy. If you want bluetooth then buy the extended battery. That will give you the talk time you're looking for.

The Micro SD Card

You have to install a Micro SD card or the phone is useless. The card will allow you to put items on the phone that you can't do without it. For that matter it helps getting things off the phone as well. And no, you don't have to take the card in and out of the phone to move the data. I'll cover below where and when the card gets used.

Format the card in the phone. Once done you'll have to remove the card and connect it to your computer. We need to create a couple of folders that the phone left out. So create the following folders:
my_contacts
my_ringtones

My Contacts

You don't need Verizon's contacts backup service. They have crippled the phone so easy isync syncing doesn't work. And no there isn't an iSync plugin for the V860. I designed one but it wouldn't talk to the phone.

There is another way. Its time to use vCards. The Barrage supports the vCard format. So we just export our Address Book contacts out to a vCard. Sounds easy. HA! That's what you think. The phone only supports vCard format version 2.1 with UTF-8 encoding. So you'll be making a trip to the preferences menu in Address Book and changing the vCard settings. Now export away. And yes you can do one export to a single vCard.

Now we just have copy our vCard to the phone through bluetooth. STOP! Hasn't this phone or Verizon beaten you down yet? Bluetooth file transfer should work. Nope. Nada. Feel the beatdown. We have to use bluetooth object push. Object who? On the Mac instead of "browse device" we'll use "send file" under the bluetooth menu. "send file" does object push. Just select your vCard file and click the send button. And have your phone in hand. You'll need to answer yes to the phone's question.

Now you're going to tell me you want your contacts off the phone and on your computer. Geeze, can't you just be happy with putting them on the phone. OK, let the beating continue. I hope you installed the micro SD card. If not then the phone has already won and this is where I say goodbye to you. What you put in the phone stays in the phone. So us happy SD card owners now navigate through the menus on the phone and copy your contacts from phone memory to sd memory. Almost there. Now we use bluetooth file exchange. On the mac its the "browse device" under the bluetooth menu.

FYI. An uncrippled phone would have made it a button click in iSync.

My Ringtones

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