Friday, October 03, 2008

O2 Stupidity

I bought a 3G iPhone the other day. Some thoughts:

The shop assistant tried to persuade me to go with the Wi-Fi (THE CLOUD) bolt-on rather than the Web bolt-on because "that's what the iPhone uses". He was a bit stumped when I asked him what good that would do me outside large cities (for example). I wonder whether this is O2 policy or he was just particularly ill-informed. (Incidentally O2's Wi-Fi bolt-on costs £7.50 a month while buying direct from THE CLOUD seems to only cost £4 a month.)

Purchasing £10 credit is obligatory when you buy a PAYG iPhone. Is that legal? I don't need £10 credit as I am using my Simplicity SIM. The £10 credit SIM also gives you a years access to THE CLOUD apparently, I need to work out if/how THE CLOUD know what SIM card you are using.

The iPhone 3G is a bit of a disappointment really. It seems buggy compared to my original iPhone, and the screen looks slightly discoloured and smaller (I know this is an optical illusion caused but the surround). 2.1 does not seem to have completely ironed out the reception issues, there is a lot of lag on the phone (opening the SMS page takes an age for example) and last night I was getting cut off when I plugged the headset in while on a call(!) Apple have still not fixed their crappy SMS client either, you still can't save draft texts, forward texts or insert phone numbers into texts and the camera is still next to useless. I was however very impressed at the network speed when using it as a modem for my laptop. (Yes I know, shush.) I am also pleased that I can now stream BBC Radio using the FStream App.

My Simplicity tariff is £20 a month for 400 minutes. While in the shop I noticed that they had an offer on for the 600 minute tariff down from £25 to £20. Most months I use about 330 minutes, last month I somehow used about 570 minutes(!) which cost me an extra £30 on my bill :( I wonder if the offer has been going for a month, and if so whether I could argue that they should have automatically put me on the 600 minute tariff.

1 comment:

gezpage said...

I know it's a bodge, but you can use SMSd if you miss those traditional text functions http://amrut.joshi.googlepages.com/

Having not had the old iphone I can't compare but I agree it's generally unresponsive. Kind of doesn't surprise me since I got my ipod classic which suffers from a buggy, unresponsive interface. I'm still happy with it though.