It's a dying practice, but I don't know why some service providers love limiting what their customers can do with a product or service they've paid money for. I can understand it's all for protecting the bottom line.

But these schemes are ultimately futile. Especially when discovering methods to break through such restrictions are a contact sport for geeks and coders everywhere, and that they gleefully share their breakthroughs online.

Case in point: a Verizon RAZR V3m. You can check out this article on WikiHow, which details steps you can take to free things up. Free to transfer files between the smartphone and Windows XP, via USB cable and Bluetooth.

And I can imagine any enterprising user can adapt the directions to work on similar models. Thanks to Sasha for the heads-up.