Ricky Says

Question: How do I change the ring tone on my RAZR phone, and also how do I set a different ring tone for each of the contacts in my phone (so a different ring tone plays for each person in my address book)?

Answer: Configuring a default ring tone for your Motorola RAZR phone is fairly easy. Just select Menu –> Settings, and then select Ring Styles. Choose the second option, which ends with "Detail", and scroll to select the ring tone that you want.

Assigning a custom ring tone for each individual cell phone contact is a little more involved.

First, you’ll need to enable custom ring tones (referred to as ringer IDs in the Motorola user’s guide) by selecting Menu –> Settings –> Ring Styles –> Style Detail –> Ringer IDs –> On.

Next, you’ll assign a custom ring tone for each contact by first selecting the contact (Menu –> Phonebook) . Then, with the contact selected, press Menu –> Edit –> Ringer ID. You’ll see a list of ring tones on your phone, and you can select the one you want to ring when you receive a call from that contact.

This feature is very handy because it lets you know exactly who is calling even before having to look at Caller ID, just by hearing the ring tone that's set for that contact.

Question: I'm a big fan of Motorola's PhoneTools software, and I've used it for a while on Windows XP to copy pictures from my phone to my PC. I recently upgraded to Vista though, and now PhoneTools won't recognize my phone. What's the trick to getting it to work?

Answer: I've also used PhoneTools for quite a while and would say it's my hands-down favorite program for connecting my wife's RAZR V3 phone to our laptop, so we can copy pictures and ring tones between the laptop and her phone (and vice versa).

I was able to get it running on Vista but first I had to download and install the Motorola USB Driver v3.5.0 for Windows (32-bit) to get it working on Vista.

Motorola makes you create an account, which always drives me nuts, so I downloaded it and saved it on my web server so at least you won't have to create an account. You can get the Vista RAZR drivers here without having to create an account.

Once you download and install the driver, then you'll be able to run PhoneTools and it will recognize your RAZR phone on Vista with a USB data cable or Bluetooth connection:

Question: My wife and I are pay-as-you-go T-Mobile customers who have just found that the Razr V3 phones give us most of what we're looking for; however in trying to "rescue" some photos off our old phones to bring some shots we valued over to the new ones, I was told that we couldn't email the photos from our computer back to our new phones without signing up for some other service that our pay-as-you-go accounts didn't at this point provide.

Can you explain to me what they're talking about? (PS. I was able to save our old phone photos by putting our sim cards back into our old phones-one at a time-and sending the photos to each other's new phones, then swapping them with each other's new phones).

Answer: The service they're referring to is probably a data plan, which is what I also am required to have in order to email pictures with my AT&T plan. Transferring photos can be expensive though, with rates often running at 10 cents per kb of file size (meaning that even a small 100kb picture would cost you a dollar each time you transfer it).

An easier and free (well, free aside from the software) way to transfer pictures between a Razr phone and your computer is to use Motorola's PhoneTools software to transfer them using a USB data cable.

Question: "It seems like the only way I can get pictures from my phone to my computer is to email them, which costs about 75 cents a picture depending on the picture size (at least with my Cingular wireless service plan). Is there another way to transfer them?"

Answer: Yes, there are two other ways to transfer photos from your Razr phone to your PC (or vice versa) without paying any wireless provider fees:

1. USB Data Cable
2. Bluetooth

I'll discuss each of these approaches in this article.

Transfer Pictures To Your PC with a USB Data Cable

Cell phone manufacturers want you to transfer photos from your cell phone using email, because that way they can charge your for the data transfer. However, if you have a USB data cable or a bluetooth connector (discussed below), then you can transfer pictures, video, and ringtones directly without recurring carrier service fees.

You'll need software to recognize your cell phone and handle the transfer with a USB data cable. There are several affordable programs that will let you transfer photos, videos, and ring tones from your cell phone to your PC. They also let you copy them from your PC to your cell phone.

Motorola PhoneTools