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I’ve had my new Sony Ericsson K850i which I bought on the $49 Maxi Cap account with Vodafone for a bit over a month, so I think now is the time to write up how I have found the phone, and how I have found the transition to Vodafone from Optus pre-paid. I’ll break this up into a couple of posts, this one being focussed on the phone.
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Since upgrading to Windows Vista, I have found more problems with the Vodafone software for the 3G broadband modems.
On Windows XP or Mac OS X, when you unplug the modem without disconnecting the connection first, it will act the same way as if you unplug an ethernet cable and unplug a USB device.
On XP, the network connection changes to a disconnected icon, it makes a disconnected USB sound and says the device has been disconnected. The Vodafone software then displays the “Searching for Hardware” message.
On OS X, the network connection simply disconnects
However, on Windows Vista it complicates it entirely. If you unplug the modem without first disconnecting the connection, you have to reboot the computer before you can use the 3G modem again.
When you unplug it, it performs the normal disconnected USB notifications, however, it doesn’t change the network status to disconnected, and the Vodafone software just sits there, counting the time connected. If you press disconnect, it does nothing, if you try to close it, it does nothing, even forcing it closed and reopening it doesn’t fix it, it straight up starts counting the connected time again.
Even if you manually disable the network connection it keeps doing this.
Plugging the modem back in doesn’t change anything, you simply cannot press the connect button again because it will not come back up until you reboot.
I am using the latest version of the Vodafone software that is meant to be Vista compatible.
Vodafone have been no help either, the software works, it just does not work correctly unless you remember to disconnect it before unplugging the modem.
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I finally got fed up enough with my phone that I went and got a new one on Sunday when I ran out of credit instead of getting more credit.
I have been looking into a new phone for a while now as my old Panaxonic X700 has been playing up, switching itself off for no reason at all, there were quite a few days where every time I looked at it I would have to switch it on first and so on. It was getting quite painful.
Now, there have been a couple of phones that I particularly liked the look of, the Sony Ericsson K800i, K810i, K850i, and the LG U990 (also known as the LG Viewty).
I have been a fan of the Sony Ericsson’s for a while, they always seem to be very nice phones, and they are also one of the few manufacturers now that has a reasonable variety of phones that are not flip or slider phones. Rhi has the K800i and it is a very nice phone. I was particularly interested in this one because it was only $200 outright with Optus, so it could be pre-paid and I could continue to use my Optus sim card without changing anything.
However, despite it being listed as a current model on the Sony Ericsson website, Optus informed me that it has been discontinued, and to buy it direct from Sony’s online store, it is $500, which is far more than I want to pay outright for a phone, especially a phone that Optus was selling for only $200. None of the other phone providers had the K800i either, so that counted out this one.
The K810i I would have gotten on a plan, I was looking at the $49 cap with Optus, but they told me that this one as well has been discontinued, despite Sony still selling it. It was the same story at other phone providers as well. So this one was also out.
That just left the K850i and the U990. Pretty much every mobile phone provider has the LG U990 in stock at the moment as LG is giving it a huge push, and I can understand why given that in my opinion, it is a better phone than the more expensive LG Prada. The K850i is available pretty much everywhere as well at the moment.
All the different providers have these both at similar prices. Optus have the K850i and U990 available on the $49 cap + $15 a month in handset repayments. 3 have them both for that price as well. Telstra is around the same. Vodafone have the U990 for the same price as well, but they have recently dropped the price of the K850i to be free on the $49 maxi cap. Note that all of these ones are on 24 month contracts. According to the Vodafone website, the reason for this is that to buy the K850i outright, the cost has come down from $999 to $749.
This caught my eye in particular. Soul Mobile also have the U990 for free on their $49 cap. I am a bit dubious about Soul though as they are a much smaller provider, and while they use the Optus network, they do their own plans (which are fairly similar to the Optus plans) and billing and I have no idea what their reputation is like and I don’t know anyone that has a phone with them. So I would prefer to avoid them.
It was basically between these two options, and while I’m not particularly fond of Vodafone’s Customer Care service centre, I have found their service to be reasonably good with my 3G modem. I am much more inclined to go with the bigger, more well known company that maintains their own network than Soul, even if it is marginally more expensive.
So that made my decision for me, I was getting the Sony Ericsson K850i.
The Vodafone store at Garden City was reasonably quiet when I went in on Sunday so I got to speak to someone there almost straight away which was excellent.
Since I already have an account with Vodafone, I didn’t have to provide new information for my credit check, they just ran it off of the previous information which was much quicker, and I passed straight up.
Providing them with another copy of my license to prove I am who I’m pretending to be, and I had my new phone. I needed to transfer my mobile number from Optus though, this is where the painful part began.
According to the girl who was serving me, the number should have changed over to my Vodafone sim card in up to 3 hours. It didn’t.
It wasn’t until Monday morning that my Optus sim was deactivated. My Vodafone sim was activated at the same time, but no matter where I was, despite getting full reception, I could only make emergency calls, I couldn’t even call the Customer Care number. Since my old sim had been cut off, I couldn’t use my old phone either (not that I had any credit anyway).
I decided to wait for a day or so and see what happened. By the end of the day though, it still hadn’t changed, so I ducked into Vodafone at Queen St Mall on my way home from uni.
I was there for maybe 10 minutes, in which they determined that my sim card was faulty and they replaced it with a new one, and straight up my phone was working correctly.
On the $49 Maxi Cap, I get $310 worth of calls and texts a month, I also get 100 free texts to any mobile phone in Australia. So it actually works out better than the Optus $49 cap as well where I would have only gotten $300 worth of calls and texts. I could have chosen free calls to Vodafone numbers rather than the free texts, but I hardly call anyone on Vodafone so the texts are more worthwhile to me.
As for the new phone, well, I will write up my experienced with it as soon as I have some more time to play with it some more. It is a very nice phone though.
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For those who read my thoughts on the four main wireless broadband providers in Australia, you would have noticed I hadn’t commented on a couple of things relating to 3, including their customer service since I have not had to deal with them more than to ask if they had a certain phone in stock that I was looking at.
Anyway, I was just reading a post by Duncan Riley after he signed up for the $29 a month 2gb contract with 3. Evidently he could have purchased it with completely fake details with no problems at all. They had him enter his own details, including an incorrect phone number since it would not accept his mobile number. While I hope it is not like this everywhere, I can’t help but be amused. I suppose though that I would prefer that to the 3 hours I spent at Vodafone when I was getting mine on the 5gb plan for $39. Almost all of it due to the credit check.
They did call me a month and a half later to say that they had decided they couldn’t accept one of my points of ID and I would have to bring in something else instead (this is two weeks after paying my first bill as well). I haven’t had time to go back in, and after all the time I spent there the first time, I have no intention of going back unless they actually decide to cut off my service because of it. I’ve paid two more bills since then and haven’t heard anything else from them since, so I guess it can’t have been all that important.
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