Right.
Friday night — last Friday — I celebrating having got Three’s X-Series activated on Thursday and took a rubbish video of nothing in particular and then emailed it to myself.
In fact the video was of me walking toward the cinema. Stupid, I know, but I wanted to revel in my new found unlimited data experience from Three. Since ShoZu hasn’t ever worked on Three, I emailed the video to myself.
Got the bill this morning.
That email cost me £1.35.
Now. That is absolute rubbish. Absolute rubbish. What ARE you thinking Frank? I’ve just read your very eloquent blog sporting your fair-use platitudes.
What is this? The lady at customer services said, “ah, you should have used Yahoo Mail and you wouldn’t have been charged.”
You what?
I used ThreeMail. I used my proper Three email address configured on the handset. And I was charged!
GAhhh.
Total arse. Total total arse. I spend all my time telling people to go and get Three because it’s UNLIMITED when it’s only some things that are unlimited.
No WONDER the text is worded in that special fashion.
Gahhh.
Read this from the X-Series FAQ:
We have fair use limits and hope you’ll use your common sense. These limits should be big enough for you to do all the things you want to do. But we’ll get in touch with you if we think you’re using our services unfairly, and especially if you’re abusing them. If we find people are using X-Series above these limits, we’ll review them. Here’s our take on fair use:
– Unlimited data is 1GB per month. Also, your data usage doesn’t include using your mobile as a modem.
– Windows Live Messenger won’t count towards your monthly data fair use limit but has its own limit of 10,000 messages per month.
– Skype on 3 is 5,000 minutes per month. If you go over this you’ll need to wait until the start of the next bill month for the service to resume, however Skype calls can still be received.
– Orb and Slingbox have a total combined limit of 80 hours a month.
Right, now work out how the hell I was billed for sending an email?
What’s that 1gb data thing? Since when is email not ‘data’?
TOTAL ARSE.
do they mean 1gb of web browsing?
They might as well just give up and go home… Even if Frank Sixt wants to provide the service we all want it’s obvious that SOMEONE at Three obviously has no interest in actually pleasing the end users!
so I’d guess that you’ll be charged for web browsing if you type the URL in directly, and don’t go via Yahoo’s search engine first. Could get very expensive if you are a savy internet user and don’t like their rendering engine.
Good thing Shozu and lifeblog aren’t on there, you’d have racked up a fortune this week otherwise.
X-Series is a great bit of marketing. Shame about the product. I’m very worried that it’s going to introduce people to the mobile internet in a way thats going to leave them with a sour taste in their mouths.
Regards
Steve.
how utterly depressing. we were all raving a week ago, finally we said, it is here…the future is no longer orange, the future is now brought to you by the number three and the letter F (for free).
but in actual fact it is no different to the rest. That’s it, I’m packing my bags and heading for Second Life.
steve
AFAIK the reason you were charged is that they view threemail as a messaging service (like SMS), whereas Mobile Mail and Yahoo mail are treated as data services, hence you don’t get billed for them. I suspect this is due to how they’re implemented on the network. I’ve sent quite a few large attachments through the mobile mail app and have’t been billed anything extra. The web browsing is also pretty unrestricted – I’ve managed to stream radio programs from the BBC website for instance. Incidentally, you don’t get charged for browsing if you type in the address directly.
It might be worth getting in touch with the xseries blog about threemail – virtually all mention of it seems to have disappeared from the three website (about the only thing you can find is billing info…).
There are a few rough edges, but generally X-series is everything it was said to be. It’s remarkable to think that when I first got a phone on three last year they still had their “walled garden” and didn’t look to be ending it any time soon.
John, I hope to have some kind of answer from the blog shortly. I think you may well be right, however what the hell does that say for their ‘unlimited’ offering? Ah well. I agree with you John — rough edges but X-Series still rocks.