March 2nd, 2009, 3 Comments »
Tod is, to put it mildly, unhappy with Fido (they apparently rebranded–who knew?). He’s a user of PhoneTag, a voicemail-to-text service with which we fell in love while living in Malta and Morocco. It enabled us to defer calls (and the associated crippling international charges) and call people back using the dirt-cheap Skype..
As Tod reports, Fido has discontinued “Conditional Call Forwarding”:
This is when someone calls me and I don’t answer or I’m out of range, the call forwards to my voicemail service.
In other words, how every voicemail system on the planet works.
I use a voicemail service called PhoneTag.com which transcribes the message into text and emails it to me. As Fido does not offer this service, I’m forced to use this outside service.
But now, you’ve disabled the ability for me to use such a service. In fact, you now bar all your customers from using ANY voicemail provider other than yours.
It’s sleazy. It seems like a cheap, amateurish grab for money — forbidding your customers to use any voicemail service that’s not yours. Besides being unethical, it’s against the spirit of the Competition Act.
That’s not cool. I don’t use PhoneTag anymore, but I’d be filled with a particular flavour of anti-Fido rage if they’d turned off access while we were living abroad.
UPDATE: Good news–Fido apparently reversed their decision.
3 Comments »
July 21st, 2008, 6 Comments »
AdHack is running a new assignment on Rogers and the iPhone:
Rogers has been criticized for its underwhelming advertising. When the iPhone was announced they had nothing on their website until a teaser appeared. AdHack member Brendan Wilson though the teaser was “lame.” Doesn’t a great device deserve better? We think we can do better. Yeah — we know you can do better!
We call this challenge Assignment #9: Create the iPhone ad that Rogers should have used to launch and promote the iPhone in Canada. You can praise it, you can hate on it. The choice is yours. Remember to tag your submission with “Assignment #9″ when you upload!
Here’s what I came up with:
It references the fact that Rogers promised an early bird breakfast to those standing in line. But Travis says “the only food was granola bars at about 10 or 11 a.m., but only enough for about one bar for every three people”.
Thus far, I’m quite happy with my iPhone. I’ve never had a GPS-enabled device before, and I find identifying my location kind of existentially thrilling. The UI is everything people say it is, and I can certainly type on it way faster than I could text on my old phone. I haven’t really discovered any must-have apps yet. I just read about AirMe, which may become my Flickr uploader of choice.
Complaints? I want a one-tap (the iPhone term for ‘click’) means of returning to the audio I was playing from elsewhere in the UI, or from when the device is in sleep mode. More importantly, the battery life is kind of pitiful. If you’re using data functions on the phone, you pretty much have to plug it in every day. I can live with that, but it’s not really satisfactory.
UPDATE: Rob from Techvibes asked me to pimp his Ad Hack commission.
6 Comments »
April 27th, 2008, 30 Comments »
Three years ago (almost to the day), I asked you, my dear readers, what cell phone I should buy:
I own the Honda Civic of cell phones. It works fine, and doesn’t break when I drop it. I rarely use my phone–I may go a whole week without making or receiving a call on it.
I bought the very ordinary Sony Ericsson Z600. It’s been fine, but I need to move up.
The biggest new requirement is that I need to send and receive email. So the input mechanism–keyboard, stylus, touch screen, whatever, needs to work well.
Everything else is negotiable. I don’t plan to record video with my phone, and I’ll take whatever still camera comes with the thing.
I could get an iPhone, I guess, but I really don’t want to spend any time hacking the thing to make it work in Canada. If setup and maintenance is pain-free, it’s an option.
So, what mobile solution would you recommend? Blackberry? Just to be clear, under no circumstances will I be wearing this thing on my hip, so smaller is better.
On a related note, should I stick with Fido? Do all mobility providers suck equally? Does anybody offer a real edge in data plans?
I’m tres ignorant on all things mobile, so I’ll take any advice you can offer.
UPDATE: I visited this page from Rogers Wireless in both Safari and Firefox on my MacBook. They get a big Browser Compatibility Fail.
30 Comments »
April 9th, 2007, 6 Comments »
About a year and a half ago, I wrote about how much the current pricing structure for Canadian mobile data access blows. I managed to spend CAN $112 for 3 MB of data. Both James and Boris link to Thomas Purves’s chart that shows how absurd current Canadian mobile data pricing is (click for larger image):
I was mostly writing this post to encourage you, my dear readers, to Digg this story. However, in the time I took to write this entry, it made it to the front page of Digg. So, mission accomplished without our help.
UPDATE: You know one thing that bugs me about the Digg community? Their apparent lack of a sense of humour. They seem to take vicious delight in digging down (or burying, if you like) any humorous comments. It seems to reinforce the stereotype of geeks as overly-serious poindexters.
At least Slashdot has the ‘funny’ category for such comments. Comparatively, Digg has simplified the user moderation on comments, but they’ve lost some important diversity along the way.
6 Comments »
March 20th, 2007, 8 Comments »
Earlier in the month, I bored the crap out of you with a Byzantine explanation of our phones-in-Malta situation:
We have three phone numbers we’d like to retain, Capulet’s land line plus our two cell phone numbers (currently with Fido). Ideally we’d like to use these numbers in Malta, but that’s probably not viable from a price perspective.
I called Fido today to explain our situation, and to see what they could do for me. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but judging from the accents, all of Fido’s technical support seems to be in rural Quebec.
My contract with Fido is up in a couple of months, but Julie’s has at least a year left on it. Jacques (Ti-Paul? Marc?) explained that our only option was to ratchet the phones down to their minimum plan, and to use them for voice mail only (which is a satisfactory compromise, we can use a land line and calling cards in Malta).
Cost: $35 per phone per month, or about $420 for six months.
Our other option would be to buy our way out of Julie’s plan, and take the numbers (thank you, number portability) to a local VoIP provider. A colleague recommended PeopleLine. Frankly, I’ve been underwhelmed by my international calling experiences with VoIP, and I don’t like the idea that when our Internet access is down in rural Malta, so too is our phone service.
Cost: $200 to cancel Julie’s contract
I’m talking this over with Francois, and I must have said the magic words. I suspect they were “cancel”, “Vonage” and “number portability”. He shuttled me over to another department–a Super Secret Department Which Shall Not Be Named.
There, another French-Canadian gave me the offer I couldn’t refuse. Free number parking for six months, with pay-as-you-go pricing for usage. We’d have to pay a little something for voice mail:
Cost: $6 per phone per month, or about $72.
That’s what I’m talking about. Sign us up. Huzzah for free markets.
Now I need to investigate whether Fido has any voice mail notification services. Can I get an email or SMS (to another phone) when there’s a new voice mail message for a given number?
8 Comments »
