Pixelicious: No more dirty phonecalls

No more dirty phonecalls

Sunday January 23, 2005 - Permanent link to this post -

After an unfortunate incident involving my jeans, my mobile phone and a washing machine this Saturday morning, I was forced to make a trip to the dreaded Phones4u.

Non-brits or non-mobile-geeks might not know what shopping in Phones4u entails. Basically, you walk through the door as ten or more 22 year old failed estate agents in Burtons suits and wet-look hair gel fight to get to you first. Either the commission is fantastic or the basic's crap. Anyway, when paying a visit to Phones4u it always helps to know exactly what you want before you go in, and exactly what you are willing to pay. Another useful thing is to know that if what you want is the newest, most advanced handset, and what you are willing to pay is £0, then you can probably get it, with some freebies chucked in for good measure. Last year I got the phone I wanted, plus a Bluetooth headset, plus an accessory kit, plus a digital cordless phone for the home, plus £40 from the till.

So I spent an hour and a half bargaining with the sales guy (if you threaten to walk out they all of a sudden have another level of management they can consult about your demands). I came away with the Samsung D500. It's a lovely phone with a small form factor and a 1.3 megapixel camera (my main requirement this time around). It has all the bells and whistles. But after considerable messing about I can't get it to talk to my Powerbook at all. It's not supported with iSync; I can't find modem scripts for it; there was no easy way of importing my address book to it (I had to copy each individual vCard accross manually). It was a bit dissapointing. A lovely phone that would be fantastic for most people, is absolutely useless for me.

The Sony Ericsson T630 I had before (now blowing bubbles rather than ringing) didn't take any setting up. It was so easy to use. But the camera was crap.

I'm going back in tomorrow to swap the D500 for Sony Ericsson's latest and greatest: the s700i. It's not as pretty as the D500 but I'm willing to put money on the fact that everything will work really well. I'll let you know how it's behaving after a week or so.

On 24 January, 02:04, John Oxton did say:
Hee hee, I’ll know what to do next time I need a new phone, in about 5 years! I just paid £26 at Tescos for a phone, it does phone calls and texts and… errr well that’s about it really. I am so lo-brow! ;-)
On 24 January, 09:31, Peter J.Lambert did say:
But John, how on earth do you browse the web from the bus, or take pictures of amusing scandanavian company names on the side of lorries when you just haven’t got your camera with you?
On 24 January, 10:17, Peter J.Lambert did say:
Hah! I just realised that Phones4U didn’t find the right Phone4Me.
On 24 January, 10:35, jodeybee did say:
less of the dad jokes just now, you’re not quite allowed to do them until the time your baby arrives in this world. At that point, feel free.
On 24 January, 14:59, Ruth did say:
I see you have used Pauls blowing bubbles comment, you must have liked that one!
On 24 January, 15:11, Peter J.Lambert did say:
Paul didn’t express any licensing stipulations on his joke. I presumed it was public domain and could be used freely. If Paul has any objection to his humour being used to further my blogging career, then I would be happy to either credit him in the original article or remove the comment all together.

Of course, a full apology would be issued either way.
On 24 January, 17:51, Ruth did say:
I believe there may have been copyright covering the statement. The last thing I heard Paul was in talks with his solicitors!!