Posts Tagged ‘malcolm murphy’

Malcolm Murphy - Is my Mobile good value?

Friday, September 19th, 2008

I’m fascinated by the pricing of mobile phones and phone contracts. The mobile business has always been dominated by a small number of providers, who offer suspiciously similar but subtly different price plans, that have always looked to me like they are designed to confuse me. Bundling a handset with my contract confuses this further: of course the handset isn’t “free”, a proportion of my monthly rental is going towards the cost of that. I just don’t know how much, and so I don’t know how much the bundled minutes and texts are actually costing me.

Except on my Three contract. What Three do is they show you the price for the tariff, then itemise the extra cost for the handset. And that means that I can see exactly how much I’m paying for those minutes. And it allows me to make an informed decision about how much the shiny new mobile is worth to me
Here’s an interesting perspective from regular contributor Malcolm Murphy.

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In my case, I pay 20 quid for 1100 minutes or texts. Or, to put it another way, less than 2p per minute or text. Just think about that. Less than 2p per minute to make a call, to a landline or a mobile, any time of the day or night. That’s cheaper than my landline provider, who want a connection fee, plus 5p per minute from me during the day, more if I want to call a mobile. Less than 2p per text message, when I’m continually informed by people in the industry that the wholesale cost of sending a message is around 3 euro cents - a little over 2p.

Except, it’s only less than 2p if I actually get round to using all those minutes or texts. And, as the people from Three are already well aware, I don’t. Well, not usually. So, I’m probably paying more like 3 to 4p per minute/text. Even so, that looks like good value. And it’s a good deal for both of us. The operator knows that I’m going to give them at least 20 quid per month for the rest of my contract. And in return for me probably buying more minutes than I need, I get a certain amount of predictability on how much my bill will be. Of course, anything international throws the predictability out of the window, but let’s put that to one side for the moment.

Now, my example may be extreme because I signed on when Three had a promotion, but it’s not massively out of kilter with the rest of the deals out there. Yesterday, for example, I walked past a Vodafone shop and saw a SIM only offer: 600 minutes and unlimited texts for 20 quid a month. So, let’s generalise and say that in bundle deals are around 3-4p per minute or text.

Things get interesting when we consider the out-of-bundle rates, or what you’ll pay on PAYG. These rates are at least four or five times the in-bundle rates. Ouch. So, either, the operators are gouging me if I go over my inclusive allowance, not to mention all their PAYG customers, or the in-bundle rates are very cheap.

I have no inside knowledge of how much it costs an operator to provide the service, but if I had to guess, I’d say that the answer to the above is somewhere in between. If I used all my minutes every month, then I suspect I wouldn’t look like a very good customer. I strongly doubt that the operator would be losing money servicing me, but they won’t be making the huge margins that their shareholders have come to expect.

I’m interested to see how the headline price for a contract will change over the next couple of years - my guess is that we will move from the 30-35 pound level that seems to be the norm currently to a 20-25 pound level. What I’m not so sure about is whether we’ll see handsets, or inclusive minutes, or both, compromised to achieve that.

But for now, while I despair at the packaging and marketing , I think that (contract) mobile price plans generally represent decent value. What do you think?

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Malcolm Murphy - Why is mobile email still not right?

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

I became aware of Nokia’s latest email offering recently, and being both an email junkie and S60 phone user I quickly installed it and had a play with it. I was intending to write a full review for this article, but I found that I kept wanting to talk about Nokia email in the context of mobile email in general, so I decided instead to write about mobile email in general. Thoughts on the Nokia offering will come later…

I can’t remember how long I have had email on my phone and/or PDA. I’m pretty sure it was no later than 1997, and definitely by 1999 I had more than one working solution. Back then, operators had dial-up numbers to send SMS, so it was a simple (!) matter of connecting my mail server to a modem and sending the text of the messages in SMS. Admittedly, it was a bit Heath Robinson, but it did work. It certainly wasn’t a mass market solution though.

Then, around about 2000, the operators in the UK all launched their own email services. You got your very own @operator.net email address, together with all the instructions you needed to configure the email client on your phone. Fantastic. Millions of pounds were spent on building those services, which, by and large, completely failed to enthuse the market. I think it’s fair to say that all of those services flopped. There were several reasons for that:
Getting a new email address is inconvenient - people already have email addresses and want to be able to use those. Forwarding mail from my email account to my mobile email is a bit of a hassle
And when I read the forwarded email on my handset, I still have to process the mail on my PC when I get back to it
If I send a mail from my mobile, it would have the @operator.net address rather than my “real” address
Of course, all this assumes that I manage to configure GPRS (or WAP dial-up, remember that?) and the email client on my phone
Data wasn’t cheap back then
So, you had people like me running my own mail server smugly getting email on my phone, and the rest of the world getting along quite happily without it, thank you.

Fast forward to today, and no self-respecting email junkie is seen in public without their Blackberry. If you want your email on the go, the answer’s Blackberry. Now that the Blackberry is firmly entrenched in the corporate email space, it is trying to make the transition into the consumer space. Time will tell if it will be successful, but I have my doubts. These doubts come from the device - I just don’t believe enough people will be willing to swap their Nokia, Sony Ericsson or Samsung for a Blackberry. Those three are massive consumer brands, and even before you consider the camera and music functions that we all need on our phones these days, branding alone puts RIM on the back foot. They’re also on the back foot because unless you have a corporate email server with Blackberry, you don’t get the seamless experience: you have to read the email on the device and on your PC.

To be fair, this last point breaks a lot of so-called consumer email solutions, not just Blackberry. And it arises because the mobile operator is collecting the email from my ISP and offering a separate service. The best solution from that point of view is Gmail - you can read, process, delete an email on the mobile client and never have to see it on the PC. Which is what I want. There are other drawbacks to Gmail, but they have this point nailed.

For some reason, we instinctively look to our mobile providers for mobile email. But there’s another player; the email provider. Google offers me the best access to the email because they’re the email provider, and mobile is another channel to stand alongside web and PC client access. So why aren’t more ISPs offering mobility as an add on to their offering? There’s no simple answer to that, but I think a lot of things that have previously held ISPs back on mobile are changing - most notably the availability of free or cheap data bundles. The really interesting opportunity is for the guys who have both ISP and mobile businesses (for example Virgin, CPW, Orange in the UK) to tightly bundle the two and create a genuinely compelling mobile email story. (As an aside, if anyone from one of these companies is reading this and wants to discuss further with me, get in touch).

To come back to what prompted this article, there is also a third player here, the handset manufacturer. The mobile application sits on the handset, so there is an opportunity for the manufacturer to provide a higher value service. It’s a fine line, because there’s a big difference between shifting consumer electronics and running consumer services, as even Apple found out recently, and also because the operators may not take kindly to being reduced to a bit part in this scenario.

Nokia’s service is positioned as a beta, and that’s how I found it. It isn’t good enough right now for my day-to-day email requirements, but it is a promising sign of intent.

I’m really optimistic that somewhere between the mobile operator, the ISP, and the handset manufacturers, we’ll see some excellent mobile email offerings in the next 18 months or so.

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Malcolm Murphy - Pocketsurfer Review

Monday, August 4th, 2008

Contributor Malcolm takes a look at the Pocketsurfer.

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It’s been several months since I first saw the Pocketsurfer. I was intrigued by the proposition – a connected device with a flat rate data plan, plus web acceleration to improve the 2G browsing experience.

Recently, the voice that says “you don’t need it” was overruled by the voice that says “yeah, but I want one” and I took the plunge and ordered one. I actually had a specific application in mind, checking email without needing to use the computer. I do of course have email on my mobile already (and have done for at least the last 9 years) but I was really intrigued by the idea of a consumer oriented device that just works. If it did as promised then it could be a useful addition to the gadgets in our house.

First impressions were good. The device has a sturdy feel to it, with metal keys that seem to be inspired by the RAZR, and it’s powered via a mini USB port. Unfortunately, the port is recessed so far that my Motorola charger won’t fit, so I had to unwrap the power supply that came with it. Ten out of ten for very sensibly using mini USB, minus several million for the way they’ve done it.

Once it’s charged, setting it up and configuring it is quite straightforward. Once you’ve got it configured, you get a configurable homepage that includes web access to your mail. There is short key access to a custom webmail interface, even if your email already has webmail, like Gmail does. At first I feared that this was because the device couldn’t handle feature-rich websites, but that was unfounded – going direct to Gmail works fine.

So, mail works.

And so does web browsing. The screen is nice and clear, and presents a kind of window on a web-page so you can scroll down and across as required. The claims that the Pocketsurfer recreates the PC browsing experience on a mobile device are not as far fetched as they might sound. Pretty much everything renders as it should. One niggle is that the Pocketsurfer doesn’t have a touchpad or touchscreen, so you have to scroll and navigate the pointer using cursor keys, which I found a little awkward. I also found the text entry a little strange to get used to; basically you have to type the text then press a button to insert it into the form or whatever. It does work, but it takes some getting used to.

The other claim that Datawind, the makers of Pocketsurfer, make is that it renders any web page faster than any other mobile device. I did a few quick tests comparing the Pocketsurfer with my E61 on Three, and the results were mixed. Not universal victory for the Pocketsurfer, but it held out credibly against the 3G device.

So, what’s wrong with it? Well, it only works when there is network coverage. Without network, you can’t do anything at all. Which would be fine, except there are quite a few places when I want to do something but don’t have any coverage. Like on the train into London Waterloo, where there are several dead spots, or in the downstairs seating area at one of my favourite coffee shops. The other problem associated with coverage is that when you move from an area with coverage to one without, the device can appear to lock, and it doesn’t recover straight away when coverage returns.

Ultimately, the Pocketsurfer does exactly what it says on the tin. Unfortunately, I actually wanted something more. In order for it to be truly useful to me, it has to be able to operate when disconnected from the network. So I can compose my email when it’s convenient to me, and send it when I have coverage.

The price of the Pocketsurfer is coming down – you can get it for around 140 quid now, and as the price comes down it becomes more and more tempting. You can find more information about the Pocketsurfer at this unofficial fan site.

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Malcolm Murphy - Pick and Mix data applications

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

I had a truly surreal experience recently, that I felt is worth sharing. John is from my parents’ generation, and you probably can’t describe him as a normob. He’s not a normal mobile user, since he hardly ever uses the thing. He carries one mainly in case of emergencies, his only handset requirement is that he has to have a clamshell so it doesn’t dial accidentally in his pocket, and he spends as little as possible on credit. “Submob” might be a better term.

So you can imagine my surprise when, completely out of the blue, John asked me if he could get podcasts on his mobile phone! While I was still in shock, he proceeded to describe the process of sideloading (although he obviously didn’t call it that) and tell me how he can’t be doing with all of that, even if his wife would allow him to use the computer. He concluded that it would make perfect sense to get podcasts over the air onto his mobile.

I had to confess that I’d never really thought about it. I’m used to connecting the phone to the PC to update my mp3s, and podcasts turn up in my PC’s media player, so it’s something I’ve gotten used to. But, as I thought about it, I realised that I had become desensitised to how inconvenient the whole process I was following is, and what a great idea over the air podcasts would be.

Leave it with me, I said, I’ll get back to you.

So I go off and do a bit of investigating, and I’m quite pleased with what I find. Nokia Podcast software for Series 60 looks like it will do the job. I download it onto my e65, it seems to work, I’m feeling quite happy. Up until last week I hadn’t even thought of getting podcasts on my phone, now I’m fully mobile enabled.

So I report back to John and I’m expecting him to be impressed. Yes, I tell him, you can get podcasts straight to your phone. You’ll need to change your phone, since the antediluvian Samsung you’ve been using isn’t up to the job. No, the N73 isn’t a clamshell, but it’s got a keylock on it so you should be okay. All well and good, until we come to the pricing.

I’m pretty sure John’s operator has a monthly flat rate data bundle, even on PAYG. Unfortunately, all John was able to find out about was daily charging. That looks expensive, even to me, and I’m used to big bills.

So, I suggested getting a dedicated 3 PAYG SIM, just for this purpose. Fiver a month for a gig of data, that’s a lot of podcasts, off you go. (See, despite my little niggles with Three, I can’t get away from the fact that their PAYG data is the cheapest and the best) Anyway, my work is done, and my reputation as someone who knows something about mobile is intact.

Except, it turns out that even a fiver a month is too much; John doesn’t spend five pounds a year on calls. So, despite the fact that he was interested in the idea, he remains podcast free, and another potential convert to data services falls by the wayside.

The whole episode got me thinking – data is an all or nothing proposition. And if you haven’t really used data services before, then going from nothing to a fiver or 7.50 a month for data is a big deal. Paying that much per month only makes sense if you know you’ll be using a set of applications, and you’ll only know you’ll be using them by actually using them. But you haven’t used data services so far because, even if you knew about them, you’re scared to do it because per megabyte pricing is expensive and opaque. Cue Major Danby.

I have no actual evidence to back this up, but I would guess that a relatively small percentage of UK users have signed up for flat rate data plans so far. And I’d guess that a high proportion of those are really hammering those plans.

Now, to be fair, there probably isn’t a solution to John’s problem – he really wasn’t expecting to have to pay for data at all. But for the rest of the data free normobs, I now have a fantasy Pick and Mix vision. Suppose that the operator could present you with a menu of applications, with a price per application that includes unlimited data for that application. On top of that, you have a bundle which includes unlimited data for unlimited applications.

So, if I only want mobile email, then I’ll pay (say) a pound a month. Mobile email and web browsing: two quid per month. Mobile email, web browsing and IM, three quid per month. Add in a fourth application (Jaiku, facebook, whatever) and it now makes sense for me to get the unlimited bundle. Then I’ll be hooked on data, and tell all my friends. And they’ll all sign up for applications that make sense for them, gardening for example. Then, before you know it, there’s one of those upward sprirals of viral behaviour I hear so much about these days. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Before you all start shouting at the screen, I know that there a million reasons why this won’t happen, but if things stay as they are, more people will be without data bundles than with them.

And that’s a bad thing.

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Malcolm Murphy - Is that Call Included?

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

Is that call included? Ofcom asleep at the wheel?

Here’s an interesting question to begin with: how much would it cost you to call a number that began 05xx? Would it be counted in your inclusive minutes? If you have a few minutes to spare, wander into a mobile shop or call your service provider and ask them. (But don’t be surprised if the answer is along the lines of “Er, dunno. What the hell is an 05xx number anyway?”

OK, so the 05xx number range is a little obscure (it’s been set aside by Ofcom for VOIP numbers). We should take something easy like mobile numbers. A number that begins 07xxx is a mobile number, right? And that’s included in my minutes, right?

Er, no.

While many, if not most, of the readers of SMS Text News will be aware that there are 07xxx numbers that either aren’t mobile numbers at all, or are not charged as such by operators, I’ve lost track of the number of conversations I’ve had with people who just aren’t aware that there could be an issue. (This includes people who work for operators!) Their view is the simple view that consumers have been given to believe – 07xxx is a mobile number.

In the UK, we have the illusion of a simple numbering scheme for telephone numbers. From that, it should be easy to understand what you’re going to be charged for a call. But it’s simply not like that. As one of the commentators to my post on reducing roaming charges pointed out, I should really have checked to make sure that my travel SIM really was a UK number and hence included in my inclusive minutes before I setup call forwarding.

The worst part is that the number ranges that may or may not be included varies from operator to operator. So a call that would be in my inclusive minutes for one operator would not be included if I move to another operator. There’s nothing wrong with that in principle, but it is confusing, and the operators don’t help. Three, for example, list the excluded 07xxx number ranges on page 32 of their tariff guide, and they’re not even in numerical order. A quick check is not possible. O2 do say that Jersey and Manx numbers are not included, but don’t tell you how to identify those numbers. Three don’t mention (or if they do, I can’t find it in the tariff guide) 05xx numbers, O2 do at least tell you that they’re excluded.

And that’s before I come to the debacle that is 08xx numbers. These are the non-geographic numbers, i.e. the prefix does not indicate where the telephone line is actually located. Non-geographic numbers are useful for all sorts of reasons, which I won’t go into here. What I want to go into is the problem, which is that the 08xx prefixes set charging expectations: 0800 is a free call, 0844 and 0845 are charged at local rates, 0870 and 0871 are charged at national rates. All well and good, apart from two things: the concept of local and national rate calls doesn’t apply to mobiles (and I don’t think it even applies to landlines any more), and we now have bundles of minutes included with both landline and mobile rentals.

The operator response to these problems is simple. They exclude 08xx calls from your monthly allowances, and have a special tariff for them. It’s not even the same rate as your overage for calls. Nope, you’ll pay extra to call a number which was intended (or at least promoted to consumers) to limit the price you would pay to call someone. I actually have to pay more to call an 0800 freephone number from my mobile than I would pay to call any UK landline!

The charging expectations that I mentioned above just aren’t met by the reality. To be fair, I also get gouged by my fixed line provider, which is why I don’t call 08xx numbers any more. (Apart from 0800 numbers from home, which are free of course.)

Again, SMS text news readers will (mostly) say that this is a known issue, mention the website http://www.saynoto0870.com, and move on. But it isn’t a known issue for normobs, and instead of things getting simpler, they’re getting more complicated. The net result is that consumers are being charged for calls that they could reasonably expect to be free, or included in their package already.

You’d think that the regulator would be all over this, but as far as I can tell, Ofcom aren’t doing much. What they have done is open up a new number range, 03xx numbers. These are meant to be non-geographic, but the cost is limited to no more than a national rate call to an 01 or 02 number, and any calls must count towards inclusive minutes in the same way as 01 and 02 calls. There’s some woolly talk on the Ofcom web site about recommending that 0870 calls cost no more than normal calls, and that’s about as far as they go.

It’s not good enough. The rules around the 03xx range are a clear sign that Ofcom understands the issue. They just aren’t dealing with it aggressively enough. It should be the case that 07xxx are UK mobile numbers, no exceptions, and billed as such, and that 08xx numbers are included in bundled minutes and billed as if they were regular 01xx/02xx numbers out of bundle.

That this is not the case, and that consumers are largely kept in the dark about the resulting charges, should be an embarrassment to the regulator, operators, and industry in general.

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Malcolm Murphy - Worst Service Ever Part 2

Monday, July 7th, 2008

As I said last time, I was happy with my package with Three: my line rental is 20 pounds a month for 1100 minutes, plus a fiver for unlimited data.  In addition, I’m spending an extra 180 pounds plus a month on international calls, roaming and data. I was happy with that, as Three’s international rates were cheaper than the competition.

After a really shoddy experience with Three when my handset failed, I’ve now set myself a challenge to see how much money I can not spend with Three. Ideally, I’ll make a saving as well, but I’m happy if I just transfer all my discretionary spend to someone else.

Still, while I want to save money, it can’t be too inconvenient. For example, there have been indirect access providers around for ages, but typically they require you to dial an access number, then enter some codes, then enter the number you’re dialling. Too much like hard work – I need to select a number from my address book and press the green button.

The other downside with indirect access providers is that they are typically pre-pay, so I have to mess around with setting up accounts and keeping them topped up. However, since I’m already having to do that because of Three’s refusal to increase my credit limit, that’s now an acceptable level of inconvenience.

Right, let’s list out the things I am spending extra on:

• Receiving calls in Europe (currentlty 10p/min)
• Making calls in Europe (currently 25p/min)
• Calling International from the UK (30p or 60p / min)
• Sending SMS to International from the UK
• Sending SMS while abroad
• Data roaming

At home and in the office, I have a Wi-Fi network. Out and about, I have a flat rate 3G data plan.

So let’s look at these spending methods and see if we can get them down a little:

Receiving calls. One way to reduce roaming receipt charges is not to receive calls at all; to divert all calls to voicemail or my SkypeIn number and just pick up voicemails and call people back. Unfortunately, that’s not massively convenient, and the callback will call more than receiving the call in the first place. So, enter a roaming SIM provider. The best deal for me is SIM4travel – their charges to receive in most of my countries of interest is zero. No pence. I get a UK number that I can take abroad, and receive calls for free. Sold. The only challenge is I get a new number, so I have two choices: either leave a voicemail on my primary number saying call my other number, or divert all calls from my primary number to my roaming number, using my inclusive minutes. I’m still waiting for the SIM to arrive, so I haven’t decided which route to take yet.

Making calls in Europe. SIM4travel’s calling rates are comparable with Three’s – 25p/min to most of the countries I’m interested in. So, I won’t save money, but at least I won’t be spending it with Three. And, while I’m abroad, I will need only one device for voice, which is more convenient than having one handset for making calls and one for receiving.

There are some more complicated options I could talk about, but for now, this is what I’m settled on.

Calling International from the UK. There are actually two scenarios here – when I’m at home/office and when I’m travelling within the UK. At home/office, I typically use Skype from my PC to make international calls. There are, of course, cheaper VOIP providers, but Skype is generally reasonable quality, and I have plenty of contacts who also use Skype, in which case the call is free.

Having a Three phone, I have the Skype application on my phone already. But I gave up using it after a few early tries partly because it only gave me skype-skype calls – no IM and no SkypeOut, but mainly because using it drains the battery outrageously quickly. But I saw the recent announcement that Skype had launched a mobile version direct, rather than through the relationship with Three, that allowed both SkypeOut and IM. So I thought I’d give that a go. First hurdle, no E65 version, but after a bit of trial and error, I found that the Nokia 6131 version works ok (funnily enough, the N95 version didn’t). The application works well enough – I can select contacts from my address book and call them. It’s a hybrid data/voice application, so the call I make actually dials a UK number, then completes over Skype. So I end up paying for a UK call (or taking it out of my inclusive bundle) and paying the SkypeOut rate. That’s not a bad solution, especially as I’m already managing a Skype account so topping up is no additional hassle. It’s still a bit of a battery drain though.

So, Skype is OK. Not perfect, but OK.

Then, I rediscovered Truphone. When I first heard about Truphone a while ago, I discounted it, because I understood it as a VOIP over WiFi play. If I have WiFi, I have a PC, so I can use Skype. Plus, my experience with handset WiFi was a battery drain. But, I was persuaded to try it again. The VOIP over WiFi is okay, but the really interesting point is Truphone Anywhere – where if I don’t have WiFi it completes the call via a UK number. Effectively it’s an indirect access number without any of the inconvenience I mentioned at the start. The integration with my Symbian handset is fantastic, all I do is select the caller from my address book, and if it’s an international number it asks me if I want to make the call with Truphone Anywhere or as a regular GSM call. If I choose Truphone Anywhere, it takes about 10-15 seconds to setup the call, then it’s done. No extra steps to take.

Calling rates for Truphone and Skype are in the same ballpark – depending on the destination one may be cheaper than the other, but both are at least half of the rate that Three charge.

Sending International SMS from the UK. If I’m at my PC, I typically use Skype for this. From the handset, I can now use Truphone for this, but the originator’s number is not my primary number, it’s my Truphone number. So that’s not very convenient. But it is cheaper.

Sending SMS abroad. No way around this. Boo – I have to give Three money if I need to send an SMS.

Data. One approach is to use PAYG SIMS for each country. Some countries have great PAYG data plans – for example there’s a Spanish MVNO (Yoigo?) who have a 1.2 euro/day PAYG rate. That’s cool, but it is massively inconvenient to manage separate SIMs for each country I visit. So I’m probably going to have to give Three money for this as well. But, since I got my Vodafone USB stick, I find I’m using handset data less and less.

The conclusion? Now I’m motivated to do this, I will probably save about half of my discretionary 180ukp/month spend. Of the money I do spend, less than 10% of that will go to Three. So I will have gone from spending 180 pounds with them to maybe 10 pounds, and save myself 90 pounds a month into the bargain.

Over a year, that will be over a thousand pounds I save, and over two thousand pounds lost revenue to Three. I wonder how much it would have cost for them to loan me a handset when I asked?

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Malcolm Murphy and the worst service ever

Monday, June 30th, 2008

My expectations in dealing with mobile operators and retailers are not high. I have come to terms with the fact that they are geared up to deal with high volumes of users who just want minutes, texts and the latest shiny phone. Move off that brief, and they’re just not equipped to help you.

A particular highlight came a few years ago in an O2 shop. I went in with a very specific requirement: mobile email. My question was essentially whether a Blackberry or an XDA was the better solution - QWERTY keyboard was a must. What did the assistant suggest? An i-mode handset. I eventually got a Blackberry… from T-Mobile.

But I digress. My requirements are pretty simple, at least I think so. I travel between 6 and 10 days a month in Europe, and I call internationally a lot from the UK. I’m also a frequent data user. After more to-ing and fro-ing than I would have liked, I settled on what I thought was the best provider for me - Three.

There are some nice things about Three. Data is 5 pounds a month. I get a lot of minutes for 20 quid a month. Go to a country where they have a network (Italy, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland - all countries I am likely to go to) and your inclusive minutes are valid, as well as the data bundle. But the kicker was their roaming rates: 10p a minute to receive, 25p a minute to call the EU from the EU. The European Commission has set limits of 19p and 38p for receiving and sending; guess what T-Mobile’s rates are? EVEN WHEN I’M ROAMING ON ANOTHER T-MOBILE NETWORK!!! That’s just silly. And while Vodafone passport sounds good - most calls are actually quite short, so the 75p per call charge can look quite expensive. The less said about O2 and Orange the better.

It’s not all sweetness and light; coverage isn’t perfect, though not as bad as I had feared. And I knew that the retail shops and internet sales weren’t integrated, but I wasn’t expecting to need much contact with them. I was wrong.

It started when I hit my credit limit. No worries, I thought, I’ll give them a call and get it increased. Not that simple. The conversation went along the lines of:

M: “Hi - I was just on a call and I got cut off - you sent me a text saying I had reached my credit limit”
3: “Yes. We have a credit limit in place to protect you.”
M: “Wonderful. I don’t need protecting, so can you increase my limit?”
3: “No.”
M: “Eh?”
3: “You haven’t been with us long enough, so we can’t increase your credit limit.”

So it turns out that the credit limit is actually in place to protect them, not me. The only way to resolve things is to make a credit card payment. I’m not happy - if I wanted to mess about making card payments I’d have got a pre-pay phone. Still, nothing like making it hard for a customer to spend more money with you. It seems appropriate to mention at this point that my monthly bill is usually a couple of hundred quid, with the occasional 500 quid+ bill shock moment.

In my mind then, I’m quite an attractive customer - I know what I want, I’m prepared to pay for it, and I don’t plan on calling for help that often.

Turns out I’m wrong.

A couple of weeks ago I return to the UK on an early flight. I have a long day on the phone ahead of me. During the flight the MP3 player on the phone is playing up, so I do various resets, battery removal and so on. Nothing works. When I get back on terra firma, I find I can’t make calls either. Damn!

OK, so plan is to swing by a Three store on my way home, get this sorted. Very helpful chappie cheerfully tells me he can’t help, I have to call 333 from my phone. But my phone doesn’t work, so he lets me call from their phone. My request is simple - the phone is three months old, it’s gone wrong, send me a new one. “We don’t do that sir, we will collect it, repair it and send it back to you.” This will take five days. How do I make calls in the meantime? “You still have your SIM” Yes but I don’t have a phone - can you lend me one? “No”. How do I make calls in the meantime? “That’s not our problem”

The store manager was willing to lend me a phone if the call centre approved it. But they wouldn’t. By “they” I mean the four different people, including the disconnections department and a manager. I actually had to check they were taping the call at one point, when the guy at the other end of the phone suggested I buy a pay-as-you-go phone from them and then sell it on eBay! I tried to appeal to them on the grounds of how much I spend with them, with no joy.

This note goes out to all service providers, not just Three. What makes you think the Sale of Goods Act doesn’t apply to you? Under what circumstance is a three month old phone refusing to make calls fit for purpose? And if your customer is willing to accept a repair, what makes you think that depriving him of service for five days is a good move? How hard is it to provide a loan handset? What other piece of consumer electronics would I not get a replacement for if it failed after three months?

So, no joy at all. I leave the Three shop a very unhappy camper. At this point, I’m seething, and prepared to cancel my contract and go with someone else. I walk past CPW and into the Vodafone store. Astonishingly, they don’t seem to want my business. Some free advice for Vodafone retail employee trainers: smugness is not an attractive quality in in-store staff.

I get home and my blood pressure is still through the roof. First job, line up a replacement handset. That done, I think about how to respond to the quality of service I’ve just experienced.

Plan A - cancel contract and go with someone else didn’t work so well. I thought about trying a different Voda shop, but couldn’t work up the enthusiasm for another retail experience. Plus, when I thought about it some more, I didn’t like the idea of cancelling the contract and paying for something I wasn’t going to use. Plus, the Three deal is still good - 1100 minutes for 20 quid a month. So – more free advice for Voda: your time to capture my four grand spend over the next 18 months was that one time I walked into the shop. You screwed it up.

So, plan B. Find ways to reduce the other 180 quid a month I’m spending with them and/or spend it with someone else.

In the next article, I’ll let you know whether I was able to succeed with Plan B, or had to go back to Plan A.

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Catch the second half of Malcolm’s article next week, stay tuned!

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Malcolm Murphy - Where is the Innovation?

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

We’d like to take a minute to break from all the iPhone hoopla and introduce a new contributor here at SMS Text News, Malcolm Murphy. Malcolm comes to us with a passion for mobile and is eager to contribute here on our blog.

With that, here is his first article for us, Where is the innovation?

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The first mobile phone I ever had (over 10 years ago now) was the Nokia 2110 - the original brick. I would probably recoil in horror if I was asked to use it now, but at the time it was fantastic. I seem to recall that I even carried it in my jeans pocket, however unlikely that seems.

Over the last ten years, I’ve had a lot of different phones, and it used to be interesting and exciting to get a new phone. I have declared on many occasions that my latest phone is the best one ever: the Ericsson R380 and 520 had useful PIM applications and offered the promise of a single device; the Nokia 6210 synchronised reliably with the PC and allowed you to enter multiple numbers per contact (a big deal at the time), the Nokia 6310 added Bluetooth - which was a huge wow factor for me; the Sony T68i redefined the jeans pocket test; the T610 and later the T630 beefed up the speed and had a nicer keyboard.

My first windows mobile phone was the Orange SPV C500, and for the first time I could have all my contacts in my phone. I still think the windows interface to the address book, where it matches T9 style from the home screen, is one of the most useful things ever to happen on a mobile phone.

Around the same time, there was innovation in style from Motorola with the V3, and from Samsung with the D500. When someone in the office got one of these phones, it was an event.

Fast forward to today. Walk into a mobile phone shop and ask them what’s exciting. If it’s an O2 store, they’ll probably say an iPhone. If not, there’s an N95 in your future (at least if the Vodafone, Orange and CPW I wandered into at lunchtime are representative – I think CPW had sold out of iPhones). Yawn.

It’s not that I dislike the N95. True, it fails the pocket test, but what I struggle with is differentiating it from any other S60 phone. Even something like the 7610, which must be four years old now. I know, I know - built in GPS, better screen, camera, more memory, blah blah. That’s not innovation, that’s a list of incremental improvements.

Hold on, you may cry - what about Shozu, Jaiku, Google Maps, and the other great stuff I can do on my N95? The thing is - they are all third party apps, not part of the phone.

It’s not just Nokia. I’m struggling to see any excitement from any phone manufacturer at the moment. It’s all just tweaks and twiddles - a megapixel here, a xenon flash there, an extra half inch on the screen, which may even be a touch screen.

Maybe I’m mobile weary, maybe it’s a sign that the industry is maturing, maybe it’s a sign that a million exciting new phones will be hitting the shops in time for Christmas. In the meantime I’ll carry on quite happily, if a little boringly, with my trusty S60 - an E65 which does pass the pocket test ;) - and wait for the next best phone ever.

I just fear I might have to wait a while.

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