52 posts from July 2008

Here, things don't get any more mobile or geekier than my old watch...

You're on the train home, you have your laptop out and you feel the urge to post!

I'm on my Eee PC 900 (I'm no longer a happy bun-Eee but that's a whole other post!) and typing away with barely any battery left (see previous typing inside brackets!)

I'm using the Huawei E220 and my new mobile broadband contract.  It gives a new lease of life to my Eee (but don't get me started on the battery... see other brackets!)

I've also got my trial Nokia 6220 Classic with me and it's holding up well.  Shame I had no luck in syncing my calender with it... I tried my best but clearly my best wasn't enough!

I touched upon this briefly in the last post, but I feel it deserves one of its own!

This has probably been around since the year dot and, perhaps, everyone but myself knew but here goes...  HotUKDeals - one of the few bargain sites I don't really frequent much for some reason - has a way to filter bargains and they have a section purely for mobile phonery.  Here's the link:

HotUKDeals - Mobile

Here's another one that I like and have consulted in the past: MobileReserve

Slightly misleading title as my trial 3 Mobile Broadband dongle hasn't gone back just yet.  However, it will in the next day or two.  Although I never got the thing working with my Eee PC (I used it with a Vista laptop instead) and, even though things weren't always 100% hunky dory, I still decided I needed to look into getting one for myself.

So, tomorrow I should be having delivered a Huawei E220.  I'll be getting up to 5 gig a month for £6.91 and the dongle thrown in.  Looking around, I think that's got to be the best mobile broadband deal in the UK at the moment.  And using 5 gig on mobile broadband can actually be more difficult than you'd imagine (I know from experience!*)

Anyone interested in the deal should check HotUKDeals out.  It's the site where I found this - oh, and by the way, you'll need Quidco.  If you've got a Linux flavoured Eee PC (or perhaps another non-Windows subnotebook) you *have* to go for the E220.  That's the only one that works out-of-the-box.  The direct link to the offer is for a different Huawei dongle but thanks to some resourceful folk on the deal's comments page you'll be able to select the E220 without any problems.

*Keep away from 720p video podcasts on Miro and you'll be fine!

Until today my sister (she's the one with the folder next to Ms Hilton) was a fairly happy, loyal customer of Vodafone.  She's been with them for a decade or so, spending £60 odd quid a month (and over the £100 mark when out of the UK).  Her phone packed up on Thursday and she's been in desperate need of a new one (see: One simple text message ruined an iPhone).  Shouldn't be a problem right?  Wrong...

She popped into a Vodafone store today and was told there were no deals they could do for her.  It's too early for her to get an upgrade apparently.  Funny thing that, her last phone (the iPhone that she's had since the end of last year) wasn't provided by Vodafone - so, in effect, she's got one owed to her!  Of course, that's not how it works - they know she can't leave just yet.  And, if she can't leave, they don't need to try to keep her.

Well, you know what?  She's left them!  She's going to have to pay £200-odd to get out of the contract but she decided that was the only option available.  Staying with Voda would mean paying full price for the kind of handset she needs - which would easily have been more.  So what did she do...?

She popped across to Carphone, switched to O2 and got herself an iPhone 3G.  She now has more calls and text allowance than she had before and, for the privilege, will be paying significantly less than she had been with Voda.

It's madness really, utter madness.  Due to the staff in one Voda store (or, perhaps, because of company policy) they've gone and lost not only a loyal customer but a high spending one that didn't even cost a penny to keep hold of the last time their contract came up for renewal.

More about why she went with for an iPhone 3G - despite all the problems she had with the last one - in a future post

My sister was unfortunate enough to be in a car accident earlier.  Other than a sore neck, she's fine.  The back of her Mini is a different matter!  For what it's worth, she wasn't responsible.

Why am I blogging about this and what's it got to do with an iPhone?  After she was let out of A&E (E.R.) she phoned me to say what happened and she explained how the RAC (AAA-like organisation) had sent her a text message that appear all scrambled and that she now couldn't access any other SMS texts on her phone.

If I understand her correctly (we're in different parts of the country, she's in the sticks, now has no car nor, at the moment, internet access) this is what's happened:

• iPhone receives text message from RAC that is a jumbled mess of wingding-like characters (or quite possibly foreign characters she doesn't recognise)
• she exits the message - after which she can't go back
• her iPhone told her she had new messages, she can no longer see them
• she can no longer see old messages
• the rest of the phone works okay (I think... she was able to call me on it anyway)
• she's tried the on/off and home button restart thingy, only as a last resort will she fully reset/restore her phone

I'm not sure whether the crash had any effect on the phone, I wouldn't have thought so - but can't rule it out.

She's now in the market for a replacement phone (although I don't think she'll be doing any shopping for the next few days!)  Any recommendations people?  I'm thinking BlackBerry Bold, maybe Nokia E71?

Christmas wouldn't be Christmas if there wasn't a shortage of the gift that everyone seemingly wants to give.  And what would that be?  Well, for the last two years it's been Nintendo's Wii.  This year it could quite possibly be the Wii yet again and, of course, that means yet another shortage!

Gamezine.co.uk

It's been an uncharacteristically warm evening here and almost too unbearable indoors.  What better excuse does one need to pick up a football and head for the park?  I brought my two youngest nephews with me and after a bit of a kick around I handed them my phone and got them running.  I explained to them that the grass was like paper and they were the pencils and off they went drawing.  Here are the results...

We also had a contest to see how fast we could run.  I was the fastest despite a dodgy ankle and er, less than ideal physical form.  To be fair though, one nephew has club feet and the other is just five.  Despite everything, I've always been able to run very fast over very short distances.  Not exactly the most useful skill in the world as I collapse into a pile after about 50 metres...

The Register has a piece entitled 'Nokia: Our Community is the best money can buy'

It's a wide ranging look at Nokia and its interaction with the world at large.  Near the end of the piece they look at the Ambassador program.  Maybe they've got a bit of a point there, I don't know.  I'm not part of that, but I do get trial devices from them via WOM World and have had a few S60 freebies as well.  It doesn't stop me from criticising their products or services though.  And WOM World continue to loan me items even if what I write isn't the most flattering.

Whether giving the likes of me a freebie or a device to trial is value for money for Nokia is open to debate.  I have no idea how many people read my blog.  I've got Statcounter, but I don't believe that's set up right and it doesn't count RSS feeds or when posts end up elsewhere somehow or other.

Orange have hardly been a leader in the mobile data market.  They've previously been pricey, unreliable and less than generous.  However things would appear to be changing for the better.  They've just announced they'll be offering the Eee PC 900 sub-notebook for "free" when you take up their mobile broadband at £25 per month for 2 years.  That's £600 in total but you are getting a laptop that retails at around £270 now and a fairly generous 3GB of data a month.

Like a lot of these deals, whether from carriers or retailers, they might not seem so generous a year down the line when the laptop seems a little dated and newer customers get better deals (like increased allowances) but I guess that's the same as when you buy a phone on contract.