Vodafone sensitive about jailbreaking discussions on their eForum

I found a thread on the Vodafone UK eForum today discussing jailbreaking. The usual mis-information was contained (posted by members of the public) with a couple of Vodafone representatives providing information about handset warranty and insurance cover when jailbroken. I decided to add to the discussion and made the following post

Nokia, I’m sorry to say, but I really don’t miss you

I’ve lost count of all the mobile handsets I have owned over the years; however I can tell you the names of all the manufacturers with relative ease, they are, “No brand name, Nokia, and Apple”. The generic / no brand name handset was the first handset I ever owned and looked like a pencil case. It was on the Vodafone network in 1995 at a time when a monthly line rental would set you back £50 and for that sum you’d get no provision other than the ability to make and receive calls. For every call you made, you’d pay £1 per minute on peak and 75p per minute off peak. Until April 2009, all the other handsets I owned were made by Nokia – it was at this point I moved to the Apple iPhone and I haven’t looked back since.

My iPhone is an extension of my being

I’ve always been excited by technology and when the T5 came out from Palm, I could hardly wait to get one. But, as with most technology, the *novelty* wore off. I played a few games, set up a few calendars, and got bored after a few months. Bored of the difficulty entering text. Bored of putting in a wifi card that I had to carry around if I wanted connectivity. Bored of finding a contact but not being able to phone them without finding a phone first. Bored with how big it was. Bored with how hard it was to turn off.

How to: Make SkyPE calls over 3G on your iPhone

SkyPE has been around for a number of years. I’ve been a user of their services for many of these. Initially using their SkyPE to SkyPE services and later a number of other products. Early adoption meant I had to endure low quality calls and often laggy services. After a while you might get used to having to work out when was a good point to start speaking due to delays; however I’m pleased to say that these issues have pretty much been ironed out. All told, this post isn’t to detail all of the different services available from SkyPE, nor is it a sales pitch or recommendation for them – it’s simply a “how to” guide for how to save money and make SkyPE calls (on your iPhone) using 3G services when no wireless network is available.

Star Trek Online: First Impressions

Cryptic have created a far from perfect MMORPG at the open beta stage, however this can be said of many previous MMORPGs such as WoW which also had its fair share of teething problems some of which are still being addressed 5 years after launch. As long as Cryptic address major issues such as lag & quirky bugs I’m quietly confident STO will enjoy a long & prosperous lifespan.

A satellite photo worth preserving: Frozen Britain January 2010

I saw the below image (and an associated article over at Gizmodo), and was so impressed with the satellite image that I wanted to keep a copy for myself here on the about here blog (being a British citizen). It’s of the UK completely frozen from top to bottom – we’re having the worst winter for over 100 years (in my region) and on the whole (for the UK) this is the worst snow fall since around 1963.

How to: Get your O2 iPhone officially unlocked

Whether you’ve literally just got an iPhone 3G or 3GS or even if you’ve had it for a while, the chances are you’ll want to unlock the handset so you are free to put any sim card you like into the handset. By doing so you’ll be free to chose which operator/carrier you like at any point. Until recently, the only way to achieve this was by carrying out a process known as jailbreaking and subsequently software unlocking your iPhone. Such a process sometimes caused confusion and in some rare cases, rendered users handsets useless to them because they didn’t carefully follow the provided instructions. Thankfully, if you have an iPhone tied to the O2 network, there’s great news – you can now get your iPhone officially unlocked and in some cases for no fee!

Vodafone UK won’t support iPhone Visual Voicemail service at launch

Like many other existing Vodafone customers I was excited to learn that the iPhone will finally be (officially) available on the Vodafone UK network. Come the 14th January 2010, handsets will be available to new and existing customers. I’ve been enjoying using an iPhone 3G on the Vodafone network since around March/April 2009. Regular readers will be aware I’ve managed this by jailbreaking an O2 Pay and Go handset. Whilst I can enjoy the majority of iPhone features on my handset, there has been a key feature I’ve wanted to use for sometime and I’ve not been able to: Visual Voicemail.

How NOT to set-up MobileMe for syncing calendars / contacts

Posted 05 Oct 2009 in Apple, Technology

mobileme How NOT to set up MobileMe for syncing calendars / contacts

I pride myself on being a good techie. I tend to thoroughly research my options before making an decisions and don’t often rush into things. (Sam might disagree with me there!) This morning I made my first rushed / gut decision in ages. I deliberated for just a few short minutes before deciding to giving Apple’s MobileMe platform a go since they currently offer a 60 day free trial.

MobileMe allows you to sync contacts, calendars, mail and bookmarks. After I’d signed up for my account and made a note of when the trial would end, I looked at the configuration options. Step one was to install the MobileMe client on my home PC. Well, I’m not at home, so I decided to skip this step. Step two is to set-up the relevant configuration on my iPhone. Simple to do I felt, so I ran through the settings.

When you enable sync for contacts and/or calendars a little prompt appears on your iPhone screen not dis-similar to this:

MobileMe Merge prompt

My personal interpretation of the word merge is: compare data in location 1 with location 2. If data in location 1 is not present in location 2, copy that data from location 1 to location 2 (and vice versa).

Apple’s interpretation of the word merge is slightly different. The way MobileMe works when enabling this functionality is as follows: Delete all existing data from the iPhone’s contacts / calendar and replace with whatever is on the users data store at MobileMe.

I discovered this backward process was their intended methodology when I came out of MobileMe and found both my calendar and contacts screens completely empty. A conversation (via Apple support chat) confirmed my suspicions. The data isn’t lost completely, I just can’t get it back until I get home and either sync my iPhone with iTunes, or install and configure the MobileMe PC app and enable syncing.

Given my raw experience this morning, I’m a little scared about my data when I come to set things up later. Needless to say, I’ll be taking a PC backup right before I set anything up. I should have read the instructions in very clear detail before I proceeded, but I do also feel misled by Apple’s usage of the word, “merge”. I’ve told them as such via their feedback mechanism and I hope that this information will stop others from doing the same as me since it’s going to be frustrating not having any contacts or calendar for the remainder of the day! I’d have been angry had I not been syncing with Outlook and got a backup!

Posted by Rob
Daytime techie, night time gamer. Married & parent of one.
  • i know how you feel on this one, had a similar issue once. luckilly i had a backup :)

    do you use exchange on your device at all?
  • Rob
    Yeah, I pipe all 22 domains I run into a mate's company (Citrus-it.net) for spam and virus filtering, then pick up mail from them using and exchange server link. It only syncs my mail and not calendars / contacts - hence the need for MobileMe.
  • i had a stupid problem (on apples part) where mobileme stopped you using its sync if you have an exchange profile as default in outlook - http://bit.ly/3YPuOq thats how i got around it. Whilst its pretty good for now at what it does (and its young age) it does need some work.
  • Rob
    I don't use exchange on my home PC - I pick up via POP3, but leave the mails on the server for 21 days ;-)

    I also don't pick up MobileMe on my home PC. I just have the sync tool in my system tray.
  • Do you ever get problems with the syc tool going to 100% CPU? Had that
    all the time on vista, seems fine in windows 7 though.

    Ben Gillam - Sent from my iPhone
  • Rob
    Not that I have noticed. I use a Logitech G15 keyboard and when I'm not gaming it displays my CPU and memory utilisation. Always very low.
blog comments powered by Disqus
Get Adobe Flash playerPlugin by wpburn.com wordpress themes