If you’re sick of phone-related posts, skip this. On the other hand, if you’re shopping for a CDMA phone and are wondering about the Mac-friendliness of the Motorola offerings (specifically KRZR/K1m or SLVR/L7c), then look no further. They will work just fine after a little bit of tinkering.

The first thing you’ll want to do when you unbox your new friend is get your contacts on there, right? Assuming that they’re living in your Address Book, you can use iSync to do this. The first thing you’ll want to do is make your phone discoverable using the Bluetooth menu, then find it using the Mac’s System Preferences. You should be able to pair the two without issue, but you won’t be able to do anything beyond that, so don’t worry about it yet.

Instead, go here for instructions on how to modify the file to work with your phone. If you’re on Verizon, you’re done. But if you’re on Sprint, rather than searching that entire forum, just go here for the code you’ll need to paste in.

In theory the SLVR should work just fine as well, using this, but I can’t verify since I don’t have one.

After that whopping 10 minutes of work, your Mac now decides that the Moto is cool enough to share contacts and calendar entries (but not to-do items) with.

The next challenge: how to transfer music and other media back and forth? BitPim is the answer. After downloading, follow these steps for setup (via the forum linked above:

  1. Start Bitpim
  2. Plug in your phone
  3. Go to preferences
  4. As phone select “other cdma”
  5. for the port [click “browse” and] use the first one that says “usb device – vendor motorola…”
  6. press ok and ok again
  7. click on the filesystem
  8. drag the bar on the right of where it says file system to make the filesystem more visible

One note; by default the “Filesystem” option is not turned on, so you’ll need to check that option in the “View” menu.

With that, you’re now able to transfer ringers, wallpapers, and other media to your phone without having to use an uploading service (=bandwidth). I used Audacity to record the ringtones from my old Samsung, exported them as mp3’s, and then transferred them over because the KRZR didn’t have any good (plain) tones.