Verizon wireless is up to no good again.

Admittedly, I use Verizon's phone service because it's pretty reliable with excellent geographical coverage. However, the carrier has had a history of disabling important features on their phones that they sell to their subscribers. In fact, the current phone that i have from them (Motorola E815) came with disabled bluetooth functions, file transfer functions and even disabled camera functions. I ended up needing to buy a $40 data cable and software to hack the phone's firmware to restore these functions on my phone (and on my wife's phone - she has the same model). Not only was this a waste of my time, but it makes Verizon look bad. The reason they do this is obvious, they want to force customers to use their network services that perform similar functions which are often more slow anyways - like transferring a ringtone to the phone or pulling pictures off of it. And these services can be very costly to use.

Well, they are at it again, this time disabling the ability to play MP3's. According to an article at C|Net's news.com:

The company's new song download service, announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, is being built around Microsoft's digital-media technology. As part of that service, Verizon decided to eliminate the phones' previous ability to play MP3 files, hoping to keep the phones' music features simple, a company spokesman said.

Even worse is that they try to spin this as not a way of disabling a phone's built in features:

"We don't view this as restricting functionality," said Jesse Money, Verizon's director of consumer multimedia services. "We wanted one music player on the phone with a simple and consistent look and feel throughout the player. If we were to leave (the MP3 support intact), then there would be two players with different experiences."

Now I don't know about you, but anyone that doesn't use iTunes usually just uses plain old non-DRM restricted MP3's because they work anywhere and are damn near universal. Also, why do they think they need two separate players - one for DRM'd files, and one for regular MP3's? iTunes will play both, so will windows media and real player (rhapsody). Trying to force the customers' hands generally only results in alienation. When my contract is up in a year and a half, i may seriously consider a switch of providers if Verizon is still trying to pull this crap. I think they would do better to give the customers a choice and build their service around a model that really does provide value and perhaps offers something better than just transferring MP3's - that's what apple did for the iPod with iTunes, and look at how successful they are. In fact apple's model is so successful, due to ease of use and simple pricing structure, that it has drawn the ire of the record industry, who is trying to force Apple to bend and raise their prices. This comes as the traditional model of selling albums on physical media continues to decline.

In any event, I urge you either not to buy one of these new phones, boycott Verizon Wireless altogether, or just buck the system and hack your phone like I did.