Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Mobile phone trouble update

The telephone was returned to me yesterday with the latest firmware loaded. I was still unable to transfer my contacts from my old Motorola to this one, although I tried at least three alternative methods - iSync, dragging the addresses to the Bluetooth icon and exporting the v-card. No luck.

I spoke to the assistant in the store who was most helpful and he recommended possible replacements - some Nokias - but advised that I check on the Apple and Nokia web sites, which I did, and confirmed that the Nokia products have iSync compatibility. In fact, Nokia have good Apple support. I left the V8 behind in the shop, expecting to be able to collect an exchange next day.

Then I got a telephone call telling me that my handset was ready for collection and was handed back the Motorola. I made a long call to Carphone Warehouse customer services from the shop explaining that I would not accept the item as it is useless to me. I have no intention of keying in 200 contacts and can not in fact physically do so as of course some of the contacts have letters Ä, Ö and Å which are missing until a new language pack is loaded, which also does not seem to be as straightforward as with the previous Motorolas. It is not unreasonable to expect to be able to transfer a contact list and diary from one mobile to the next by some means or other when both phones are of the same make and the new is sold as a successor to the old.

So I made the shop take the phone and got a receipt. In the meantime I hae signed up to a contract but am without the new handset which forms part of that contract. I am not getting what I have paid for. As I originally returned the handset within four days of purchase, it was well within the time limit for exchange, but agreed to try it again after it had been checked by a technician and reloaded with the latest version of the firmware. I have wasted the best part of four days fiddling about with it and talking to people on the telephone, as well as having had to deal with the unpleasant manager of the Churchill Square shop.

Unless the matter is dealt with in the next couple of days I am also no longer in a position to actually collect the handset and deal with the task of setting it up as I am going away very soon for several months.

The moral? Perhaps, avoid getting a new mobile phone if the old one is OK. But the guy in the shop was helpful and put me on a cheaper tariff, though I did not need to sign up for a new contract to have done this. The problem was not his fault - he assumed that is the phone was described as a successor to the V3, it would have had at least all the same features and then some, instead of less. Also, it sounds as if Motorola has gone to the bad again, as quite apart from the compatibility problems, the software is not easy to use. Even if Carphone Warehouse does nothing at all about it and leaves me with a new contract and no new phone, this trouble will have cost them all the profit they should have made, so perhaps they should be more careful about what they sell.

Kommentarer

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...

Battery trains fool’s gold

A piece by the railway news video Green Signals recently reported the fast charging trials for battery operated electric trains on the West Ealing to Greenford branch, in west London. In a comment under the video, I described the project as technological overkill, bearing in mind that before dieselisation in the 1960s it was worked by the tiny steam locomotives of the Great Western 1400 class, a 1932 design based on an 1870s design. The money that has been spent on the experiment would have paid for a small fleet of the old things. Elsewhere in the comments, I was critical of the 800 series trains. This produced a response from the makers of the video, as follows. “I may be grasping at straws here but I am guessing you don't like 8xx series trains all that much and rather wish we still had Kings, Castles and (for the branches) 14xx's. Fair? ” My reply was as follows... Yes you are grasping at straws. The model for long distance stock is the class 180, which is a 23 metre veh...