Three Customer Support

Under a month after buying an HTC One from Three it developed a fault, a physical fault. According to Citizen's Advice and the Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982 it is Three's responsibility to supply me with a handset of satisfactory quality and that will last a reasonable amount of time. However Three were not interested, repeating again and again that physical damage is not covered under warranty, that the damage must have been caused by my own carelessness (without even examining the handset) and that in any case HTC is responsible for the warranty. They've told me that theirs is "standard worldwide practice", ie, English law somehow doesn't apply? They've ignored, and seem to have no knowledge of the letters I'd sent (by registered post), and one of their shop assistants actually advised me to commit fraud by taking out insurance after the fact and then claiming on it, saying that going down the legal route (ie, asserting my legal/consumer rights) would just be "a headache for everyone involved".

UPDATE: I took Three to court (quite easy to do online) and won by default when they continued to ignore the situation. They only paid up (the full price of the phone) when I threatened to send in the bailiffs.

HTC One Cracked Camera Glass

Just under a month after getting my HTC One I put my hand in my pocket to stroke it and felt a sharp edge. Taking it out of my pocket I discovered that the material covering the camera had cracked. I have done nothing out of the ordinary to cause this, and have certainly treated it better and had it for a much shorter period of time than all of my previous phones, none of which have broken like this.

I am not alone in this. In fact there is a list of approximately fifty people with the same problem on XDA. That thread is full of flames, conspiracy theories and wild theories, but at the end of the day a considerable amount of the users reporting the issue have either posted a photo or have accounts older than May.

HTC said that physical damage is usually not covered by warranty, and that if I decided not to go ahead with the repair after hearing their quote (which others have reported will be $90) I would still have to pay £25 postage to get the phone back. Citizen's Advice said that under the Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982 Three are responsible for supplying me goods that are of "satisfactory quality" which should last a "reasonable" amount of time, however they are really not interested and say that I should have noticed if there was something wrong with the phone when I bought it.

UPDATE: I took Three to court (quite easy to do online) and won by default when they continued to ignore the situation. They only paid up (the full price of the phone) when I threatened to send in the bailiffs.

UPDATE: I paid HTC a total of £85 to repair the cracked camera glass. There are now many walk throughs, including videos, showing you how to replace the glass yourself, which could be much cheaper.

Fix HTC HD2 Digitiser/Touchscreen

Make sure you try a soft-reset first by pushing the little red button on the back of the phone while it is on. After four months I just discovered that that fixed it. Luckily I hadn't ordered a new screen/digitiser on ebay.

The Mess That Is The Mobile Web

I wanted to check an ebay auction on my mobile the other day. I typed in m.ebay.co.uk as the m subdomain seems to be the common mobile web shortcut (see m.google.co.uk and m.flickr.com). But that didn't work. Next I tried ebay.co.uk/mobile (I think I might have googled for that) which linked to pages.ebay.co.uk/mobile/web/ which in turn promised me that the address I was after was ebaymobile.co.uk. But that didn't work either! Eventually, I think through googling some more I found it at wap.ebay.co.uk. eBay isn't the first company to use the wap subdomain, see also wap.tfl.gov.uk. I think the most rediculous mobile subdomain I know of is nationalrail's pda.ojp.nationalrail.co.uk. Kai is against the .mobi TLD as he believes that it will fragment the web, but as all these subdomains suggest, we do need separate pages for devices with small screens, as good as CSS is, it cannot do it alone, and once you admit that we need different pages for mobiles wouldn't it be easier if we all knew that we could use the .mobi address? I really do prefer the m subdomain over all of this though, purely because it's fewer letters to type on a tiny keyboard. Incidentally wap.ebay.co.uk is pretty good and ebay.mobi forwards to ebay.com.

UPDATE: Another thing that annoys me is browser detection. If I go to a mobile site I do not want to be redirected to the desktop site just because the site in question doesn't know about the browser I am using.

UPDATE: I emailed ebay about their issue, and surprisingly they responded. In their email was this gem: "We do have carrier-specific mobile sites." WTF?

Service With A Scratch

About a month ago my phone (an HTC Touch HD) started to behave oddly, often not having reception in residential areas and not being able to make calls or send text messages even when it did. Being used to fluffy (l)user support calls I gave it some time and eventually compared the reception of my phone to my friend's HTC Diamond Pro. The reception of my phone was undoubtedly, markedly worse so I started the returns' procedure, which apart from an amusing email ("The quotation has been resolved... Don’t worry, we’ll keep you fully informed.") and phone call ("What does 'The quotation has been resolved' mean?... This line's very bad... isn't that a bit of a problem for a call centre?") went smoothly and my phone was picked up and fixed under warranty, without question (despite the fact I'd bought it on eBay) in 5 working days. However the screen has been scratched and the unlock code wouldn't work as they'd changed the main board and hence the IMEI number. So I called them up again (I have to say that it really is a lot more pleasant and less stressful to speak to a native English speaker) and again they agreed to take it back to fix it without question, they will even collect it this very afternoon. So I am left with an overall sense that HTC offers good service, despite the fact that if their phone hadn't broken in the first place, and then hadn't been scratched while being repaired I wouldn't have had to go through their returns procedure, no matter how quick and pain-free it is.

UPDATE

Iris Browser / The Reason I Sold My iPhone

When I first started this post, nearly a month ago, I wrote that Iris browser from Torch Mobile still feels a bit like a beta product. But development of Iris is proceeding at such a pace that this is no longer the case. Iris has always felt like a solid browser, ever since I first started using it at version 1.0, unlike iPhone's Safari which regularly crashed on me. Version 1.0 was all of two months ago now and since then virtually all of the issues that have niggled at me have been addressed (the one major one remaining being copy and paste* within the browser).

When you first start using Iris you may find that the specifics of the user interface odd and even annoying, as my first email to the ever responsive Iris feedback address attests. However after you've been using it for a while these unique traits start to make sense. Clicking and holding to activate a link really helps to avoid accidental clicks, the resulting animation on the link itself, which I can only describe as a visual "boing", serves as Iris's own haptic feedback and the animation on moving/opening/closing tabs serves to inform you about what's going on, and I am assured that pages load while this is going on. Another great feature of Iris is the little inset scrolling window, which not only serves to show you where you are on the page but is also a very quick way to scroll around the page. It's unbelievably quick.

One of the best things about Iris is (was) that you get the iPhone gmail interface. Unfortuntely google, in their infinite wisdom, recently "improved" their User-Agent detection code which foobared Iris in that you no longer got the nice iPhone interface, but instead got the horrible (on such a large screen as the Touch HD) mobile interface. I noticed that this link from google calendar will still give you the iPhone interface (on any browser).

Having said all that, Iris isn't quite perfect. The click and hold isn't quite consistent, I think that some javascript actions happen immediately while others need the hold. Drop down lists appear so small as to be almost unusable, as previously mentioned there's no copy and paste within the browser and some of the user interface still isn't quite brilliant, see history and bookmarks and Opera does some stuff better, such as their auto-full screening and easy access tabs, back and home buttons.

A friend asked me to give a quick mention to W3's WCTMB test with its new canvas test, on which Iris scores 11 out of 16.

* You can actually copy a single word or whole link, and paste, by tapping and holding in the usual context menu way.

Old News

As instructed by the iPhone Dev Team, I held off updating to 2.2 for some considerable time. Having now been given the go ahead I can report what many people must have known for quite some time:

• The battery life is much improved. I usually have to charge every two days, recently after four days the battery was still reporting about 50%!
  
• Responsiveness is somewhat improved. After the upgrade I was very impressed with speed of loading SMS and Maps for example, however it seems to be slowing down again :-/
  
• FStream works properly! Meaning that I can actually (and practically) stream BBC radio over 3G, yay!

Having said all that, after spending an hour on a train trying to use FStream I found that 3G reception is frustratingly flaky and the battery life wasn't *that* much improved, when you actually use your phone.

Of course if I had a mobile with an FM radio none of this would be an issue. So that was the excuse I used to buy an HTC Touch HD.

Having now had a chance to do the same train journey again (in double the time, thanks to the snow) I have now discovered that FM reception is as flaky as 3G coverage, and even ends up being more frustrating, because at least the stream just stops, whereas with FM you drift into intermittent static.

The Touch HD was a bit of a disappointment, mainly because it just wasn't that different to the iPhone. The touch screen is also nowhere near as sensitive* (different technologies I believe) and is not even consistent, the edges need more pressure, which means that often the 'a' key does not register my weak strokes. I really like the predictive text feature, although it's a shame that it doesn't try to correct typos like the iPhone. (I've been told that the iPhone has a predictive text feature, but I can't find it.) Windows Mobile is pretty horrid and the Opera browser is a bit slow and has a nasty habit of continually auto-scrolling to the point which you were on on the previous page while a page is loading and you're trying to scroll. One thing that is definitely better is finding and using contacts, you can always start typing a name and the most recently used will popup. Also the camera seems pretty damn good.

* When I first got the iPhone I actually found this annoying.

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.