Just a general gripe today, I’m in that kind of mood. First of all, a bit of background. At Christmas, we finally succumbed and got a portable telephone for our eldest daughter. Because, of course ‘all my friends have got them’, and because we could never get on the computer, because she was spending hours a day surfing ebay and looking at pictures of phones, at ever more exorbitant prices.
Until then we had fobbed her off with our old telephone, but of course it didn’t have a camera, a video camera, lots of games, or an MP3 player, all of which are essential for the modern young phone user.
So far, not too complicated. Just before Christmas we went in to the phone shop and ordered the phone of her dreams, seemed easy enough. Just sign up to a 30 euros a month contract for the next 100 years and we could have the phone for next to nothing, very reasonable. The phone was in stock, but because we didn’t have the necessary paperwork – birth certificates, marriage certificates, driving licences, utility bills and passports were all they wanted to have photocopies of, if I remember correctly – we agreed to return to buy it the following day.
That same evening, daughter told us that the ‘phone of her dreams’ (the one we had ordered) was, in fact, complete rubbish, with bad sound and poor picture quality. What had she been thinking of. Presumably someone at school had said something unfounded and inaccurate, but the damage was done. Since the whole point of a teenager having a phone is to impress friends at school there is little point in buying one that will make her the laughing stock of the classroom
So another hour or two of research later, and we came up with a different model, and the next day actually managed to buy it, as soon as our identities had been screened by Interpol and various other government agencies.
Now, mobile phone contracts are complicated beasts at the best of times, but this one seemed straightforward enough. Pay 25 euros each month, get free calls after 9pm, a free ring-tone and a picture each month, that kind of thing and just what she wanted. So we signed up and became the proud owners or a little shiny telephone.
Now I don’t want to spend all day writing about the troubles we have with France Telecom and Orange and the Samsung E350 (for that is the phone), so I will summarise just a couple of the little problems:
The free ring-tone and picture were not available, however hard we tried, and however many helplines we called for information. Little things to us, but important to her, so eventually we went back into the shop and explained that we were being charged 3 euros for each ring-tone, although they should be free. After a lot of grumbling and an hour on the phone sorting out that month’s free picture and sound for us, they had resolved the problem. But they had needed to use the new portable to sort it out, by ringing a premium rate phone-number. We got the free ringtone, but it used up all of that months credit to get it – 25 euros worth. Not really what we were hoping for. although there is of course a premium cost phone number we can ring if we want to complain and try and get our credit back…
But much better than this is the MP3 player on the phone. For those who don’t know, an MP3 player is a modern day walkman that holds enormous amounts of music on a tiny memory chip. That will be useful for her, so I started trying to load songs onto the phone. After a while it seemed that a lead was necessary to connect the phone to the computer, which we duly bought, at a very reasonable 35 euros. We then duly returned it to the shop because it didn’t work.
Obviously this being France a refund is out of the question. So instead we now have an infra-red transmitter that I am going to try and use to transfer music with. That is today’s challenge.
Funny thing is, because of the MP3 troubles, I did a bit of research on the phone and MP3 on the internet. I found hundreds of people saying ‘lovely phone, this Samsung, but I can’t seem to get music onto the MP3 player’. Literally hundreds of them, and never a clear explanation of how it could be done. I also tried the Samsung site – that forced me to download an enormous file management system, then that didn’t work either.
So the question is, is it actually possible that they have made and sold this phone and it is simply not possible to use it? This is an interesting idea, because we all know that everything electronic nowadays comes with hundreds of functions and features we will never use. So, the manufacturers must know this as well. So, why would they waste money on making the features actually work? If the sole reason for having an MP3 phone is to tell people that you have an MP3 phone, then it is of no consequence if the MP3 player actually works, or not.
And if they need to give a credit note to the one in a hundred who actually wanted the feature, so be it. It still makes good business sense, and we could all learn something from this approach.
Recent Comments