No Guarantee

About 18 months ago I bought a refurbished Dell from Gasteiner Technologies which came with their standard one year warranty. Last Friday it died and will no longer power on. I had heard a rumour that under EU rules retailers must always give a 2 year guarantee with substantially expensive/electrical goods. It seems that this is not quite true, but that is because the British Sale of Goods Act meets and exceeds EU law. The SoGA says that an item must last a reasonable length of time. All this left me wondering if standard guarantees/warranties have any point at all? Let alone expensive "extended" warranties.

Usually I would be up for the fight, but I am not really sure that I want to peruse this, I almost accept that I took a risk in buying a refurbished laptop and this time I lost. Having said that they did sell me a laptop for £500 which has broken after 18 months, and that's not really acceptable.

Incidentally I was surprised to find that Dell didn't have one standard price for replacing the motherboard of my laptop. I was originally quoted €400, but when I pointed out I could buy a new laptop for that I was told that I could get a discount, the best deal I was eventually offered was £100 if I bought a three year warranty for £160, which if I was then guaranteed to have a working laptop for three years would have been quite a good deal, if I wasn't so against extended warranties and giving Dell any of my money. I've since been told that buying a laptop from Dell is similar, it's always best to ring them and see what's the best deal you can get from them. The representative also used the rather odd analogy of not being able to take out a warranty on a dead person. After I questioned her on what she'd said she swore that she'd said "insurance", though it still seems a bit of an odd thing to choose to say.

UPDATE: The BBC has a good article on this.

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?

Technology Bites

I received what looked like a piece of spam from one of my contacts today. I called him to check and sure enough he hadn't sent it. It seems that spammers are more and more turning to cracking peoples' accounts in order to get spam through filters.

Various issues with the EasyJet website:

• Insurance is still added automatically, despite orders by EU regulators to do otherwise.
• Once you have provisionally chosen your flights, you don't seem to be able to change them without actually "removing" them first.
• Baggage costs £8 per journey leg, but booking a return journey you are only given the option for the entire return journey at £16. As far as I can see the only way to get individual £8 option is to book the two legs separately, and then you have to pay the card fee twice, which is £3 for debit cards and £6 for credit cards, so you may not be much better off anyway.

Booking train tickets is also a bloody nightmare, the train companies seem intent on hiding return fares and promoting single fares. Yes two singles can be cheaper, but you often have to be very flexible with your times otherwise you can end up spending twice what a return would have cost. Bring on renationalisation I say.

My HTC Touch HD is finally back from the repair centre working!

Fourth Time Lucky

My HTC Touch HD is back at the repair shop. For the fourth time. Since HTC fixed the scratches, after much persuading, that were picked up from the first time that I sent it back the screen had been going blank intermittently. I really don't think much of the quality of their repairs.

Flashing The HTC Touch HD

Because I keep forgetting:

1. Start Win7 in "allow unsigned drivers" mode.
2. Turn off USB connectivity in ActiveSync.
3. Start the phone in bootloader mode by holding down vol down while booting.
4. Update the drivers to those here. Note the 64 bit option. If "the device cannot start" unplug the phone and plug it back in again.
5. Run USPL.
6. Flash ROM. (Serial HT847KD00009.)

I guess steps 2. and 4. may be unnecessary once you've done it once.

Or...

1. Copy BLACIMG.NBH into the root dir of your Storage Card.
2. Turn off your device by using the Power Button.
3. Remove storage card.
4. Go to Boot loader mode. (Push and hold Vol. Down + press Power button.)
5. Insert storage card when you see USB displaying on screen.
6. Disallow USB connections in ActiveSync.
7. Disallow On-Access virus scanning.
8. Run USPL 2.5.
9. Phone should restart and ask you to press the power button to start flashing the ROM.
10. Apparently you should always do a hard reset after an update.

More Service From HTC

Finally getting to the bottom of my HTC service woes. Actually spoke to the repair centre today, who claim that there is no way that my phone could have been scratched while in their care. When I told them that after the first repair it had come back without a screen protector it sounded like I was making it up :( They also said that I didn't fill in the check sheet the first time to say there were no scratches, well that was because there were no scratches. Also really annoyed that it's taken days of effort from me to actually get this information out of them.

HTC Service: No Longer Funny

So I sent my HTC Touch HD back for the third time a week ago. Usually by this point I have had about three emails giving me some useless, meaningless, but I now realise still reassuring, information. I called today as I am going on holiday tomorrow, and I don't really want it delivered while I am away. The first call made me wonder if they had just lost it. The phone that is. The guy said that it had been delivered but that "delivery had failed" and then asked if it had been collected. Well yes. He didn't call me back. The second person tried to call the repair centre while I was on hold. When they didn't pick up he explained that they might be on a break, and would I like him to ask their secretary to get them back in from their break. Not especially. He also couldn't see any record of my request to not have the phone delivered until I'm back from holiday. He didn't call back either. At 5 I called back again, and finally was told that my phone was "on hold" due to the fact that I hadn't replied to the email that I hadn't received. Apparently I needed to answer some question, which she couldn't tell me, but she would email the repair centre, which by this time was closed, who would email me the question again.

Recommended Listening

This year's ever excellent Reith Lectures began this morning on Radio 4. The first lecture, Markets and Morals is especially relevant with the news today of Shell capitulating days before they go to court over the executions of Nigerian activists 13 years ago.

Favourite quote from the lecture: "We need to recognise that there are some things that money can’t buy and other things that money can buy but shouldn’t."

Scratches Without The Service

I spoke too soon. Once I'd received my phone back for the second time, still scratched, I wasn't so happy with HTC's service. I am even less happy with their service a day later when neither of the two people who've promised to get back to me have done so, and I still haven't received any emails regarding the next pick up.

Apparently they have two problems. My phone is regarded as still in transit, despite the fact that I have it in my pocket, this means that they cannot open a new support call. Also they have just discovered that they cannot make outgoing calls, to people such as the transit company/department to ask about why my phone is reported as still in transit. Presumably this is also why no one has called me back, though why they didn't know they wouldn't be able to call me back is anyone's guess.

Incidentally I have found that the best way to get through to someone quickly who will be able to hear and understand you is to dial 01279 206906 and then choose technical support, option 2.

Something That Sucks About news.bbc.co.uk

I really like the BBC News site, but there is one aspect that completely sucks: search. First you type in your search terms, so far so good. Now press enter or click "Search". What's this? A random list of results from the entire BBC site. But I was on the news site, blatantly I want news results only. So click on "News & Sport". Now I want the most recent result, so I click "Order by date". But I'm not getting the video I want. Oh, videos are separate, of course, on the right. So I click "more like this" under the videos, but it's not there. Now how do I get back to the normal results? How many clicks is that? I don't know, I've lost the will to live.

Eventually I gave up and found the video I was after on YouTube. Albeit in worse quality.

Another thing they could do would be to provide links to new stories from previous articles on the same story, currently they only do it in the opposite direction.