Group Failure

I'm back in work today, and having spent a night under air cooling conditions I'm not terribly appreciative of the lack of the same in the offices I work in.

It's 30 degrees outside, and all we have in the way of equipment to cool yourself down is fans... small ones at that. So the office is very warm, and very stuffy.

Only at lunchtime however when I go outside to eat my lunch I realise just how bloody hot it is, I only last 10 minutes in the sun before I have to scamper off and find shade. Even my twix has bit the dust, turning into a mushy goo contained only by the plastic wrapper that is now neatly retaining melted chocolate and caramel.

I'm very happy when it's hometime and stick the aircon in the car to maximum warp and leave it that way for 5 minutes before I even put a foot in it, so by the time I get home I'm nicely chilled.

Phil brings home my new phone and so whilst dinner is cooking I have a fiddle with it. Firstly, getting the SIM card is is quite tricky to say the least, but after getting over that hurdle and removing the copious amounts of protective wrapping off the phone I manage to have a play. It seems though there is a problem with either the phone or my sim card. For some reason I can't get the phone to read the sim in terms of the phone book, so whilst I can make calls by manually typing in the number, I can't access any of the entries I've got stored on the sim - all the phone does is say "Please wait..." indefinitely, and whilst I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt to it taking a bit of time (what with Java etc) I think 5 minutes is totally unpractical in terms of trying to make phone calls using numbers I have in the phone book.

So now I'm onto vodafone customer service, who despite being very pleasant were ultimately useless, opting for them just to send me a new phone (because it's obviously faulty), but they don't have any in stock. Not content with that solution then I tell vodafone I'll ring them back if I can't figure out what's wrong with it, as I don't really want the hassle of returning a damaged phone and waiting for a replacement.

Phil then tries his SIM in the phone, and voila, the phone book seems to work fine with his sim, it loads with no problems. So there is nothing wrong with the phone, the problem seems to lay with my SIM card. He then sticks my SIM into his phone (a samsung), and notices that there are loads of weirdo characters next to the names in the phone book, which I surmise must be from where I had organised the names into groups on my Nokia.

Some fancy finger work later we've managed to get rid of all the weird characters, and try my SIM back into the motorola, and hey presto, it works just fine! So obviously (now of course!) grouping numbers on a Nokia results in the Motorola not being able to read any of the data, and the work around for that is to either ungroup the names, or get rid of the strange characters that assigning a number to a group seems to generate when you do it in a Nokia.

Anyway, it's all working now, hurrah! I have to say my worries about the menus were to some extent unfounded as it seems pretty intuitive. Things I have found difficult to do though are deleting an entry from the phone book (the only way I've managed to do this so far is by deleting the name and number from the details which seems to prompt a "Delete contact" option - which IMHO is a bit long winded to say the least. I also haven't figured out how to have one name with lots of numbers associated to it... a job for tomorrow maybe.

I did try out the camera though, pretty cool with zoom ability and now have a photo ID of Phil so his picture comes up on the screen when he rings me... pretty cool!

All I need to do now is to get me a funky ringtone, the ones that come with the phone as standard are a little dull for my liking... needless to say though it won't be that stupid crazy frog that will be prancing around and squawking from my phone.

Posted by Abi on the July 13, 2005 10:01 PM

sjon at July 15, 2005 7:39 AM