Looking for a cheap Bluetooth-capable portable MP3 player? Buy a no-contract smartphone and don't activate it!

My father needed a portable Bluetooth-capable MP3 player with large or expandable memory. Portable MP3 players with such features typically sell for $80+ (Trio mini), with the nicest units being at least $150 (iPod nano) or much more. The cheap models have terrible battery life (3 hours for Trio mini). Creative solution? He bought a no-contract LG Optimus Exceed 2 from Verizon Wireless for less than $50 at Best Buy and used a 16GB microSD card that he already owned.

LG Optimus Exceed 2, Prepaid (no-contract) Phone from Verizon Wireless

This particular no-contract phone is fast, runs Android 4.4.2, and can be used without activating. In fact, it is very easy to bypass the initial activation screen with a special key sequence – volume up, volume down, back, home – pressed after restart at the language selection screen. After bypassing that screen just once, the phone is happy to run unactivated indefinitely after that – it will never present that activate screen again. Use airplane mode to prevent phone from looking for a network to save battery, and flip on WiFi and Bluetooth. It's like a $50 iPod touch. Nice deal.

You can get this phone from a number of places, as shown in links below. Of course, there are other no-contract phone choices you could make (check all no-contract carriers – Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile USA, T-Mobile, etc.). If you're willing to compromise on the phone software or other capabilities, you can get decent "MP3 player phones" for $30 or even $20.

• Amazon.com ($50)
• Best Buy ($50) 
• Fry's Electronics ($40)
• Walmart ($50)
• Verizon Wireless ($80 and claims full retail is $249)
• LG Life's Good (info page)

For example, you can get essentially the same phone from Boost Mobile packaged as the LG Realm for only $35 on Amazon right now. It's $40 from other retailers.

LG Realm, Prepaid (no-contract) Phone from Boost Mobile

So that's like a $35 iPod touch. Even nicer deal!

I hate DRM so much . . .

. . . and today's news (CNN: "Studios sign off on movie downloads") doesn't make me feel any better.

If I buy a song or a movie or an audiobook, it's MINE. I should be allowed to do anything I want with it. In particular, I should DEFINITELY be allowed to put it on my cell phone rather than my iPod. In fact, I should definitely be allowed to put it on BOTH of them. Additionally, when I upgrade my phone or when the DVD I just burned dies, I should be allowed to copy it AGAIN onto my media; I should NOT be locked out and forced to buy a new copy!

I know this is a bigger issue, and on the bigger discussion I'm convinced that copyright/IP laws do much more harm than good. However, even without that, if I'm not distributing my purchsed media to someone else, I should be allowed to do anything I want with it.

(on a related note, yesterday I tried to move some MIDI (that's right, MIDI) files (ringtones) over from my old phones to my new phone; to my surprise, those MIDI files were copy protected! The phone refused to let me move them! And this is an UNLOCKED and UNBRANDED PHONE! We're not talking about Justin Timberlake's latest howling -- we're talking about 3 second long MIDI RINGTONES! Hell is on earth)