Vodafone pitches Comic Sans as the next Crazy Frog The search for the next ringtone - a product that costs nothing but customers will willingly pay for - has finally borne fruit with the launch of FlipFont, a Vodafone service enabling punters to change the text font on their handset. Fonts available at launch Vodafone customers with a Nokia N73 or N95, experiencing a …
This brings back memories of terminals with downloadable font sets, and email messages with unfiltered escape sequences. Flip your bosses VT100 (yes, I'm that old) into upside-down characters, then tell him it's a known bug, and he'll just have to invert the screen until the service tech arrives.
Will this FlipFont application react to any old SMS messages with the right content in them? Could be fun...
I think this sort of thing should be stopped, it's getting to the point where taking advantage of rich peoeple is becoming a sport, when we shoudl really be treating them like fragile retarded members of society that they really are, iPhones, fonts, Gorden Ramsey reciepes, when will it all stop.
(I don't have a coat, I sprayed it with a can of gold paint from halfords and sold it to a rich twat)
"We've so little money with our mortgage going up, our fuel bills going up, our food bills rising. I know, instead of buying food for the kids I'll just by a new font for my mobile........"
Jesus wept - hasn't the "credit crunch" made us get real ?
Suggest that anyone from now on that brings out these time and energy wasting ideas should be banned from any work apart from washing Russell Brands underpants.....
"How do you break your phone trying to change the font?"
Well if it's an unofficial hack on a Nokia handset then you're probably talking about writing over part of the firmware. In flash memory. That's a tremendously stupid thing to do. Trying to get that function working properly is going to cost you a few bricks.
I think it's a great idea. Now people can have a phone with a Crazy Frog ringtone, wallpaper of amusingly subtitled cat pictures, and their whole UI lovingly rendered in Postcrypt or Revue. It's a perfect indicator of who to avoid like the plague.
The next step, of course, will be to offer translation of all labels/documentation into txtspk, lolcats, and other such languages of the modern world. Then the idiotificationism of mobile phones will finally be complete.
"(Remember the fuckwit who blew $4k on the "iJewel" app?)"
hate to mention it, there was more than one! was it 5? 6?
there was a hack app for the a panasonic flip phone ages ago which could re-skin it, I think that included fonts. riskd stuff though!
with these symbian handsets, it's not the same proposition though, it's a full-blown OS so things are a bit more OS-y. could divert from original flash fonts to new area, or app could intercept?
still shite idea though.
I had an n73 a while back, and I recall changing the font one day when I had little else to do- it wasn't tricky and didn't need overwriting the firmware.
ISTR that it was as easy as replacing the font file that was in a hidden folder in the file system. As I recall the tricky bit (which I sidestepped by poaching a font file from somewhere else) was getting a font file in the not-very-common format. There were half a dozen that were knocking about then. I'd imagine that this application would be fairly trivial for someone with a bit of experience writing for the platform.
Have a dig about online and I'm sure you'll find something. I also recall that when I had cause to do a factory reset on the phone sometime later the font changed back to the default less pretty font, but by then I'd got other things to take to bits and tinker with.
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