okay bear with me, at the moment I can't afford a super duper smart phone so I have a cheap no-contract account with Virgin Mobile, my phone recently decided it would be cool to go for a spin in the wash (and yes i did try rice and everything else, the vibrator motor, which is located above the screen, shorted and continually vibrated, died, and then the screen died) so I got a new one, the Kyocera S2100, when i got it activated I went to add my contacts and i noticed that it came with some contacts pre-loaded (911, 411, 'your number", Voicemail and something called Song ID). so I went to delete them but THERE IS NO WAY TO DELETE THEM!!!! now in my opinion this is unacceptable. why would there be contacts that I don't want? now i would be perfectly happy if they were delete-able, but this makes me mad

It's called provider branding. They put in crap you don't want in the hope you use it and they make money from it. Simple as that, and all providers do it. Since it's not Android you can't root it to remove it, so you'll have to live with it or get a new phone that isn't branded

So they can make money if I dial 911?

I guess they just started to do this too because the phone that got washed didn't have any of this.

No they put that in there for convenience.

They've been doing this for years, it just happens that the previous phone you got didn't have it. Some manufacturers might not allow provider modifications.

hmmm.... I wonder what song ID is, did a google search and got zilch. the contact is a * followed by 2 numbers.

Song ID is a service like Shazam where you can use the phone to identify a song that is playing. It may charge you though.

Reflash your phone.
Here in Brazil the providers now sell the phone 'clean'. But before they sold with a lot of operator junk, I just reflashed my phone to a clean firmware, and got rid of these things.

how do I do that? where do I get the firmware?

I don't know if you can do it with a Kyocera (???) phone.
I think it`s only possible for Nokia phones (I have one ).

Kyocera S2100 is a Virgin Mobile-only phone, and from what I've searched, there are no firmwares available to download.

yea i google it too, got nothing

Ugh CDMA -- top tip: join a GSM provider (AT&T, T-Mobile, anyone with a SIM card except Nextel iDEN) -- GSM phones are easier to take from carrier to carrier and they're used by many more people (see: 88% of the world) which means there are more options for debranding etc. It's easy to debrand cheap Nokias anyway

Oh plus you can get Androids on the cheap. At least in Aussie, <$100AUD

OH, and GSM phones aren't littered with the rubbish CDMA providers shove on their phones. Most carriers esp. CDMA ones love to hate the iPhone since they can't shove their bloat on iOS, they can do it to a degree on Android but not like they used to with phones around 2007-08

Hey, CDMA isn't trash. At least not here in Brazil. The sound quality is best if you compare with GSM. I have a Nokia 2280 CDMA.

My old Motorola and Samsung phones have that. My LG Prada (don't ask) and HTC Wildfire didn't.


Some of the people on here like me (and I think Andy too) are British or are living in Britain, and iirc Europe has no CDMA support. I'm not buying CDMA phones until it has matured enough to have full European support. Besides, I can't buy a CDMA phone here.
Android is somewhat easy to debrand. Just root it and put CyanogenMod or another custom Android firmware on there. For anyone with a Wildfire, use Revolutionary.