jeremy.id.au

Well we have just moved from the house that I’ve been living in for the last five and half years (since dad died), which is also the house that I grew up in. Though five and a half years is nothing; Mum had been living there for over thirty-three years!

Needless to say it has been a mammoth effort, with over a week of shuffling backwards and forwards. Emptying of the old house being only completed today. So goodbye to my childhood home and the house that I’ve spent almost twenty years of my life living in.

While now I endure the pain of dialup, as I wait to have broadband reconnected. So far ‘rejected’ by Telstra, though ‘correctable’. Also, many boxes remain unpacked. Though we have moved to an area that is greener and possibly more prestigious, it appears to lack the life that the old area had. Let alone, the selection of take away food and restaurants we had.

I promise something that wasn’t to do with bike riding, so here it is (took me long enough). Recently my old mobile phone started playing up. The replacement phone I chose was the Nokia E60 so here’s the verdict.

I’ve never really been a fan of Nokia phones, though I was more or less sold by the features. A phone that supports WiFi (802.11g even) sounded quite useful. It certainly has its uses; this includes checking my emails in the morning without having to wait for my laptop to wake from sleep and I have been able to use it for net access from some open wireless access points. Overall, however, I would say I haven’t been wooed by Nokia from this phone.

First of all, it’s not quite like my old Siemens ME45. That phone fits snug in your hand, feels very solid and you couldn’t wish for it any smaller. My only regret with this old phone was that it had a monochrome screen when colour ones were just coming out and the lack of bluetooth. I’m sure there were things I was disappointed about though after the years I’ve forgotten what they would have been (at 3.5 years, it lasted very well).

Now compare this to the Nokia E60, width and length, it’s not much larger than my old phone though the old phone has curved sides which seems to make a fair difference. I could fit the old phone in my pocket along with my ipod a lot easier. Though on the positive side it’s thinner so it’s less visible through my pockets if I’m wearing jeans and I don’t have my ipod. It’s not as comfortable to hold and it hasn’t got the same shock-resistant design though fortunately I haven’t dropped it yet.

More on the positive side, Bluetooth syncability has been a great addition. While my old phone could be synced over IrDA and rs232, this became obsolete when my new laptop didn’t have either. And while I used to to back up contacts, the calendar only had miniscule storage capacity so I didn’t use it. Being able to sync it with iCal on my mac has been a great enhancement, not only for appointments and meetings, though to-do items as well. This probably justifies the new phone, though it could have been achieved with any bluetooth phone. It didn’t have to be a Nokia or WiFi capable.

The negatives would have to include user interface design. Many people rant and rave about how user friendly Nokia phones are, though I’m now suspecting that this is nothing but a myth (it’s possibly that most of these people are just the long time Nokia users). Now while the interface hasn’t been impossible to figure out (probably only because I’m tech savvy), however it has been far from logical. For example, I spent ages trying to figure out how to get the in-call timer showing (i.e. the thing that shows the duration of the call as you speak). Anyone would swear that the setting for this should be found in the main Settings menu, however, it was buried away in a settings menu in the part where you actually go to view recent call times, etc.

Another downside is that it didn’t ship with a stopwatch or a countdown timer. You’d think that such a sophisticated phone would have such a basic and trivial feature, but no. Not to worry, there are some third party programs for this though, some that cost an arm and a leg if you want the Symbian polished looking native version. Though if you search a bit further you’ll find some free J2ME ones that are a bit trickier to figure out, but appear to do the job.

Another let down is that although the phone supports VoIP calls over WiFi using SIP, it doesn’t cope with NAT traversal at all and I’ve yet to get my local asterisk setup going properly yet. Another funny thing is with task management, unless you quit an application it continues to run though if another app needs memory and there isn’t any free, then an app in the background may get closed. Yet there isn’t actually any way to see which apps are currently open. I guess it’s not such a huge problems but that’s probably one of the things that differentiates Symbian from a real operating system. In any case, I suppose it’s not a PDA after all though.

While there are probably other issues, that is probably enough to detail for now. I’m sure I can make do with this phone for now. Though the question is, will it last another 3.5 years like the old one?

Yes, I’m posting this a bit late. None the less, last Saturday we had quite a significant downpour. First of all, I took the train out to Camberwell and noticed I was heading into dark storm clouds, it was just obvious that a storm was going to breakout though I didn’t realise how soon. Received an sms from a friend I was meeting saying the weather is terrible, yet got off the train and didn’t feel like the storm was going to hit all that soon. None the less, it hit when I was as far from shelter as possible. Well okay that wasn’t really much more than 50 metres or so but it was raining heavily enough that it was enough to get drenched. I caught some shelter then dashed for the Burke Road shops. I probably choose the worst time to cross Burke Road and that is when I got drenched the most as the wind was blowing the rain horizontally and the rain was at it’s heaviest. Even still, it was warm enough that it didn’t take long dry out.

On the way back, heading down Canterbury Rd in the car, the road was just about flooded in places, with streams of water either side and anywhere that the road was low there was water right across it, being sprayed into the air as cars went past. Closer to home the the stream the side of the road was so massive that there were just about some little mini cascades in places and the water was brown from picking up clay and silt. Fortunately, when we got to the front of my house it appeared as though the drainage was a little better and the road wasn’t flooded. Though again I must have chosen the worst time to dash for the house. As I stepped over the gutter it had become a raging current, while just inside the gate the footpath was all flooded with no way around it.

Fortunately with the way the land lines, our property doesn’t flood too much. Though due to some design issues with the house, a little bit of water does seep in through the pit (seating area with fireplace). A little bit also came in near the kitchen window. This is essentially because a massive amount of water flows off a valley in the roof and then the excess water that doesn’t make it into the down-pipe flows under the house.

Though the worst of it became apparent until a day or two later. On Sunday the phone line had become a little crackly and by Monday it wasn’t working at all. Strangely enough the ADSL was still working while the phone was completely dead, rather ironic when Telstra makes you have an active phone line for ADSL, yet it doesn’t even need to be working for the ADSL to work. So Telstra came out to test the line, finding that the fault was probably on our premises. In the one hour that I was actually out of the house on Wednesday they came and left a note to say we had missed them. Fortunately mum had called up our phone provider (AAPT) to see if it had been fixed and arranged for another Telstra tech to come the next day. Turns out it was the extension going to the kitchen that was causing problems, possibly dangling in the mud. The tech disconnected it until we can get someone out to run a new cable. Fortunately it wasn’t much to relocate the cordless phone to the first socket on the line.

So that’s that, by around midday Thursday, we finally had a working phone line.

Had the strangest phone call today:

Me: “Hello?”
Them: “Hi, is that Jeremy?”
Me: “Yeah”
Them: “It’s Aunty Di”
Me: “Who?”
Them: “It’s Aunty Di, I’m after trying to find your Mum’s phone number”
Me: “Sorry, I’m not quite sure who that is, I don’t have an Aunty called Di”
Them: “Oh, this is Jeremy right?”
Me: “Yes”
Them: “Jeremy H?” (started with H)
Me: “No”
Them: “Sorry, I must have the wrong phone number then.”

Now to work out who this Di is and why they’ve got my name and telephone number!

I signed up to give SMS.ac a try having received an invitation way back in early 2003. There existed hardly any of the warnings about this site that you can now find plastered all over the web today. I thought it might be handy for sending the occasional free SMS (there did exist some geniune free SMS sites in the past), though I never tried using it, which is just as well as I’ve since heard that they charge these messages as a premium SMS to your friends phone account.

In the mean time i received a fair few spam messages to an email address I didn’t even sign up to their site with, alleging to be from friends. Eventually I did go back and check the site out and all, again I didn’t find much use for it and found it annoying as hell because they had some flash player thingamajigs that keep blaring mobile phone ring tones.

At some stage earlier this year, however, I started getting annoying SMS messages from SMS.ac. I didn’t think much of it, except they were annoying so I went back to the site once again trying to figure out how to stop it. All to no avail. Little did I know I was being charged for the messages which were being sent as “premium content”. Having gone back to the site again, the only way you could find any instructions on how to disable these messages is if you go to billing (which I didn’t since I never gave them any credit card details) or closing your account (which I did go to eventually due to sheer frustration). I certainly had never requested such ‘premium’ messages through their site or my phone.

Though the question is, how can charges be made to a phone when such services were never requested, especially through the mobile phone itself. This is clearly a scam. Even Telstra’s own Customer Terms clearly state that such charged content can only be accessed “from your mobile
phone”.

Telstra’s customer service people of course proved to be unhelpful and claimed that Telstra is powerless and has no responsibility over such ‘premium’ SMS billing. They told me I had to contact 5th Finger for any refunds, who in turn were referring me back to SMS.ac in the US. That is until I mentioned the magic TIO word back to Telstra and proceeded to lodge a complaint with the ombudsman. They eventually refunded $14 or so (at $0.55 per a message), however, while I was pleased that they refunded something I’m not even entirely sure if this amount is accurate. I have some indication that it may have been more than this. Though the fact that it’s a pre-paid account certainly doesn’t help.

In addition it appears that Vodafone NZ were doing some investigations over SMS.ac.

So stay away from SMS.ac at all costs. Though if you’ve been stung already, don’t take your phone company for face value that they can’t do anything because they can. If you’re in Australia there’s TIO, you could also report it to ACCC as a scam (in which case be sure to mention that 5th Finger, as the local company, facilitating it) or if you’re fed up with spam from SMS.ac then you could report it to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (again if you mention their local links, that is 5th Finger, this could help).