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Archive for the ‘htc’ Category

It has to be said so I will.. “against my better judgement” my wife bought an HTC ONE X recently from THREE. I’d suggested an iPhone but no, she wanted Android. The move to THREE was partly my fault – as I’d ditched Orange as they kept backtracking with their “unlimited data” offering and generally support was useless – Indian call-centres with people working off scripts – and not very well.

I’ve had no cause to griped at THREE and to be fair the ONE X is a powerful and sleek-looking phone, but today, Maureen’s sparkly HTC ONE X decided it was ready for an operating system upgrade. We followed the simple instructions – and before long we had an updated phone.

No problems, absolutely fine – except that whereas before it was working with WIFI perfectly, now the WIFI was stone, cold dead. Nothing I could do would make it find either of our access points it had previously worked with perfectly.

So at around 5pm I rang THREE. Guess what – Indian call centre, same routine. I could tell within minutes that the guy did not know how to solve the problem – his amazing answer “well sir, we’ll have to restore the phone to factory settings” – in this day and age – do people REALLY find this acceptable? All your settings gone – all your apps needing reloading-  it was THEIR fault the upgrade didn’t work.

The fellow decided the best way was to LOGMEIN remotely to my PC (good job I had a PC). He installed the HTC Sync Centre – the idea being to backup all the files to the PC – well, it would NOT talk to the phone under any circumstances –while he was struggling, I was looking on Google –apparently this is a common failure with the HTC phones! All I got when I pointed that out was a “?”

After 4 hours he ended up telling me how to backup music etc. which I already knew – the hard way. This would not of course backup Apps or contacts – but I’d pretty much figured that out.

I thanked him and put the phone down, backed everything up (4 hours of my time is worth – well half a day!) and reset the unit to factory settings, including removing and re-inserting the SIM.  All done – all back to just-purchased status quo… but no WIFI!!

So we rang THREE up and explained. Would you believe they were offering options like sending the phone for repairs with up to 28 days downtime!!! This is a virtually new and expensive phone. You can imagine how we handled that. Right now after much shouting and bawling, we’re down to 10 days down-time – as against a replacement phone on Monday, which is what we need… not to mention compensation for all the time I spent and will spend re-installing everything – it’s being escalated to complaints and they will ring us back tomorrow. What a USELESS BUNCH.  A phone that can’t handle an update and a company that don’t know what to do about it. This would NEVER happen with Apple – I’ve upgraded my iPhone and iPad umpteen times without a single hitch!! I’ve also had stuff out of warranty replaced at the Apple store without question. Customer first.

Update 30/8/2012 – Only after getting stroppy with customer services did we eventually get them to agree to send an envelope to arrive Monday – with a “promise” verbally and “we will try” in writing to return the phone in 5 days. The PROBLEM is if they don’t find a fault they want to charge £20 !!! 

Here’s the deal, we went to the market today and lo and behold the WIFI started working – great – went home – as we approached home – one of our WIFI signals started to work – GOODNESS…. but by the time we got up the hill to the house – the signal had vanished. In the living room with the router – nothing – not a SAUSAGE. By now I was beginning to have ideas – so I went to the bedroom at the far end of the house – CONNECT. I did a series of APP downloads – flawless. I then walked back downstairs to the living room where the signal originates and unbelievably – the signal got weaker – and eventually disappeared as I got to the living room.

I can and will REPEAT this and put a video on YouTube – because otherwise tech support at Three won’t believe me.

Against my better judgement (but then it’s usually that way) my wife, desperate for a new phone and frustrated by continued delays with the forthcoming Samsung S3, decided today was going to be the day she got her new phone and so off we went to the Metro Centre in Gateshead.

She headed to the Orange store where she got her original HTC Desire from – and I managed to persuade her to pop firstly into the 3 store – where I got my iPhone 4. Having been an Orange customer for many years, some time ago I’d simply had it with their utterly useless technical support and wavering definition of “unlimited data”.. I went to get my iPhone 4 and they informed me that I could have unlimited data – but that I would have to pay an extra £10 a month to share that data with my iPad. Well, you can imagine how I felt about that and to cut a long story short, I simply got out of the contract and went elsewhere.

3 offered truly unlimited, unrestricted data- and sure enough having bought my iPhone 4 with 3, I could share it with my iPad – and have done ever since, not to mention playing endless Internet radio when in the car. Marvellous. I have no complaints – batter life could be better but then that applies to virtually all top-end phones.

For the above reasons alone I did my best to convince my wife to change suppliers. She was not convinced until today, we went first to the 3 store and they were offering the new HTC One X for £29 a month with unlimited data. Back we went to the Orange store wherein we asked the assistant if they had the new Samsung – no. Ok, did they have the HTC X1 – yes – at £41 for unlimited data. This apparently is the best they can do – when asked if they still matched other people’s rates the assistant INSISTED EMPHATICALLY that they’d never done that. Sadly for him we both have long memories of having had Orange do just that on several occasions… by this point we were so disgusted with Orange I didn’t have to do any convincing – straight across the road to the 3 store and shortly thereafter out came my wife with a brand, spanking new HTC One X.

I’m not that keen on HTC having had many years of dealing with their phones supplied to staff.. and having watched buttons drop off etc.… but I have to say, they do seem to be improving. Whether this model will compare to Samsung S3 or the forthcoming iPhone 5 is another matter but the setup (Ice-Cream Sandwich) was devastatingly easy, the large screen is stunning and the phone is very light and thin. With a 1.5Ghz quad-core processor the screen is lightning fast and transferring information from the old to the new phone, I did in the store while she was filling in forms.. a trained monkey could have done the job. 

Key things to note, the HTC desire, though capable of handling a large external memory was screwed by having only 256 meg internally – and no matter what you do – you have to use a small but of that memory for every application you install – even if that application itself is stored in external memory.

The ONE X is very different – out of the box it has 1 GB of internal memory but ALSO has 32GB of permanently built-in “external” memory.  Installing the Sat-Nav software we use along with Spanish and UK maps hardly made a dent in the available storage and I’m confident the phone will handle more Apps than are likely to get installed by a long way. The S3 incidentally will have a higher monthly cost so that needs to be taken into consideration when comparing the two.

As time and experience progress I’ll update this blog. Up to now the white model is looking very nice. Would I swap for my iPhone? No, they still have a long way to go – but Ice Cream Sandwich is a very welcome improvement on the previous operating system version…  First thing to get tested once the battery is fully charged will be the 1080p HD video recording capability…  I mean – in a PHONE for heaven’s sake!!