Rodeo Phone?

For a while now I had been aware of something strange with my RAZR V3. The couple of times I had tried to shoot a video with the camera it would always stop recording after a few seconds. I assumed that somewhere there was a setting that was triggering this, something due to battery life or memory, and that if I wanted to I could reset it. I never bothered to reset it because I never really cared to be shooting a video with my phone.

Tonight I wanted to shoot a video with my phone. I was in a rehearsal and wanted to capture a few seconds for discussion in class. The sequence is maybe 15 seconds in length so rather than go get my camera I figured I could get it with my phone. I couldn't. Every time I tried to shoot the recording would stop after 4 seconds. I went looking for a setting and failed. I turned the phone on and off and removed and resent the battery. I deleted some garbage files and checked the free space in memory. Eventually I got it to shoot an 8 second video, but it still cut out on its own. I never did find the setting in any of the menus.

I eventually walked out of the theatre and hit the internet. I checked on T-Mobile's site. They have a good site and I think their customer service is good. I found the V3 operators manual and looked up video. Here's what I found:
Reasonable instructions, but nothing about a length restriction. Although I do start to wonder if perhaps the lengths of videos are capped because the intent is that you would send them as multimedia messages and if they got too long that would be a bandwidth problem. But at this point this is just speculation, and I have yet to find instructions on how to change the setting, or any kind of confirmation that I just don't have a defective phone.

So I abandon the .pdf of the users manual and start to look through the help sections on the T-Mobile page. Fairly quickly I find this:


Did you see what I did:

What? Is this some kind of phone for rodeo enthusiasts - people wanted to video message their amigos the latest footage from the bull riding competition? Who would want a phone that takes 8 second videos?

When I bought the phone, I remember being informed it took video, I also remember not really caring. But nobody said to me:

One of the greatest features of the Motorola V3 RAZR is that it can take a full 8 seconds of MPEG video!

Now that, that would have been a pitch I could not have turned down. I think perhaps there's a small truth in advertising issue here.

I have an email into the tech support. I can't imagine this is a hardware issue, the thing must be programmed to stop recording after so short a period. If it can be programmed it ought to be reprogrammable. I'll let you know.