Meanwhile, I couldn't change my 2006 phone's wallpaper without paying Verizon to enable the USB connection with a PC. I ended up taking a picture of the wallpaper using the phone, and then setting that image as the wallpaper. It was a 2-inch screen so it didn't look too bad.
Yeah I heard US telecoms were insanely draconic (why were they allowed to act like that though? lobbying?)
In Europe they weren't saints either but they weren't as bad when locking down your phone and mostly just resorted to SIM-lock, instead of locking other features as well.
From what I remember, Verizon did this with dumbphones, which I think ran similar OSes. So if you wanted to change the ringtone, you had to buy it from the crappy e-storefront on the phone. Same for wallpapers, and moving phone pictures to a computer via USB.
In 2008 I picked up a Windows Mobile 6.1 phone (Samsung Blackjack) that didn't have any such restriction. USB worked and it had a microSD slot for me to add in movies and music. I could crop an MP3 and simply transfer it to the Ringtones folder via USB mass storage.
Was there no way to flash it with a less restricted firmware? I remember running Alltel firmware on my Verizon Razr. And I was able to do similar things to the Rizr I got as my next phone.
