Tag: Mobile Phone

Ben Tatasciore and his team at Fone Zone Strathpine are legends.

I complained to Ben yesterday about my poor experience with Telstra and he solved my problem. Basically the upgrade to a 3G sim card broke my messagebank service, and Ben helped me navigate the labyrinth of Telstra to find an intelligent lifeform that was able to “Re-provision” my phone and get my messagebank working again.

Thanks for the excellent service, Ben.

Special thanks also to Anthony at Telstra who flipped the right switches and made the right incantations to get it all working for me.

As an addendum to my report about MyPhoneExplorer that I mentioned yesterday, another nifty feature is that when it’s connected to my computer, and I receive an incoming SMS, it pops the SMS up on my compuer screen. Plus when someone calls on the mobile while its connected to the computer, a popup flashes on the screen to tell me someone is calling, and it tells me who the caller is.

I am a very happy customer now!

I love my new Sony K800i mobile phone.

I can email, take photos, videos, browse the net, watch Fox-Tel, listen to the radio and use it as an MP3 player. Mine came with a 500mb memory stick, and a nifty little adapter so you can plug the stick into your laptop.

I have two gripes:

GRIPE 1. The softwae that comes with it is useless. This bloatware is almost 50mb to download. It fails to install, with heaps of DLL errors. Gives errors when you uninstall it, blurts out wierd pop-up messages in chinese when I reboot my machine, and renders the phone unusable when connected to the laptop via USB.

SOLUTION 1. A FANTASTIC program called MyPhoneExplorer – it’s free, only 2mb in size, installs with no problems, does everything the Sony software pretends to do and more, and is easy to use. It even has a great utility where you can use your computer keyboard to navigate around the phone rather than pressing the small keys on the phone. If you download it and like it, don’t forget to send a donation to the author. He accepts paypal.

GRIPE 2. Telstra. It took 18 hours to get my new 3G Sim Card activated. While they were doing that, by messagebank service died. I tried phoning them 4 times, each time on the phone for 30 to 40 minutes. On 3 of those occastions they cut me off after 30 minutes.

SOLUTION 2. Any suggestions? I won’t touch Optus with a barge-pole because they’re majority owned by the Singapore government who has the nasty habit of executing people by hanging. I don’t know anything about Voda, 3 or AAPT. Telstra is sort of like an alcoholic uncle. You don’t like him very much, he does nasty things, but you’re worried if you swap him for someone else’s uncle you might end up with someone even worse.