Telstra vs 3 deathmatch
Last Thursaday, I ditched Telstra mobile after seven years. The story goes like this: I made a lot of calls in April because I was buying a house and the loan application got a bit tricky. I had to make lots of phone calls, I had to be available so I used my mobile phone a lot. The bill came in at $180 for the month. I rang Telstra to let them know that I had had a bad month and maybe they could help me out – so the kid on the phone in their billing department flicked through her three ring binder (you know the one with all the scripts of how to field calls) and offered to extend the deadline for the bill by two weeks. I asked her about changing plans to try and stop this happening in the future and she said I could go on a $49 cap but also paying $27 for the phone on top of that.
The next day I did some sums. My coworker is on a $29 cap with 3 mobile and has to pay $10 for his shit-hot Nokia E65 (ok so it’s not the best phone you can get but compared to the $27 I pay for the V3x). So over two years, I could go on Telstra’s cap and spend $1824 or I could cop a $350 fee to get out of my contract and pay $960 to 3 and get a better phone, not including that I could sell the V3x (it’s not locked to Telstra’s network).
The only bit I got wrong was that in my enthusiasm, I told Telstra to stick it before I’d talked to 3 so I couldn’t transfer my number.
The really good bit though is that the E65 is blowing my socks off. I installed Fring on it today and skyped out on my home wireless network. Yesterday, I was in Sydney and I surfed the net for free in the Qantas lounge. Very nice. The wireless is very cool and it seems like there is a healthy amount of development of good stuff for Symbian. My coworker has given me heaps of good advice to pimp it up so I’m very happy and not too sad about having to cop the steaming turd of a bill that I’ll get from Telstra next month.
Here is a little transcript of some links from my coworker.
3/05/2007 3:34:14 PM: http://www.businesssoftware.nokia.com/bc_search.php
3/05/2007 3:34:25 PM: best thing to get is this: http://www.businesssoftware.nokia.com/mail_for_exchange_downloads.php
3/05/2007 3:34:53 PM: look here for software you might like (eg tomtom) http://www.ipmart-forum.com/index.php
3/05/2007 3:35:34 PM: and congrats you now have a symbian phone: http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/
3/05/2007 3:37:43 PM: see my latest update on page 10: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=715434&p=10
3/05/2007 4:22:07 PM: this apparenlty gets around the problem of some apps not supporting access groups: http://www.smartroaming.com/public/index.php?mid=1
3/05/2007 4:24:13 PM: “I use birdstep smartroaming to do wifi with M4E. You can define an access group, but unlike the built-in method it seems to the Nokia that it’s a single point so it works in apps like M4E which seem to require a single, rather than group AP.”
3/05/2007 4:25:31 PM: how to setup vpn policy for it: http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?t=80837&page=12
3/05/2007 4:26:32 PM: and apparently the smart roaming app can auto connect to vpn as a trigger
3/05/2007 4:26:32 PM: nice 3/05/2007 4:27:29 PM: you might also want to use it as a voip phone 3/05/2007 4:27:42 PM: but ill let you figure that out 3/05/2007 4:27:52 PM: i have tried ‘fring’ – with its skype 3/05/2007 4:27:59 PM: but pure voip is much better apparently 3/05/2007 4:29:21 PM: heres a good vpn guide for the e65: http://www.e-series.org/archives/246
The only thing I’m unhappy with is the non-existent OS X support.
[tags]3Mobile, E65, Fring, Mobile Phones, Nokia, Skype, Symbian, Telstra, WiFi[/tags]
