New Phone Tips
Technorati Tags: Australian, Mac OS X, Technology
If you've every been through the new mobile phone dance there's a few things you'll come to understand pretty quickly.
- Its never simple
- You will only be able to sync your contacts if you do some research
- There's still going to be setup issues.
Why is it never simple?
You would think in this day and age getting a new mobile phone service would be the simplest thing in the world. I mean we have a home phone, a mobile for my wife and broadband services so it should be easy - ha!
The first thing that went wrong was that through a basically arcane set of rules, Telstra wouldn't allow me to keep my original mobile number without paying over $1200 in plan breakage fees. This requires more background, so here it is, some years ago I joined a company and they took over my mobile account for me, nice and sensible really since 99% of my mobile use is for work.
Shortly before I left the company, Telstra signed the company up for new NextG handsets (also nice) but there was a sting in the tail, the company had been signed up for 2 year contracts on the new handsets. The first problem occurs here when the company didn't inform us of this fact (not normally a problem I guess) and possibly the company wasn't clearly aware of it. Either way, it should not be a problem, this is the 21st Century after and we've had number portability for a long time in Australia. It should have been even less of a problem as the company wanted a new number on the NextG handset on the same plan. Do you think Telstra could do this? Not a chance, long and short of it, after 2 days of high-drama the ruling was that the only way to keep my number was to break the contract, pay the breakage costs then get whatever plan I wanted, oh, and get a new number issued to the company on the same plan that had just been broken...
That's right its not possible to take a phone number (an intangible item) and release it from a plan and substitute a new phone number in place of it. Interestingly if I was being harassed on that phone number I could get it replaced without affecting the plan (but then sadly that old number couldn't be used for X number of years). So, first lesson before you run off and get your corporately sponsored phone transferred to your name, make sure that there isn't some hugely expensive plan associated with it.
The other reason it wasn't ever going to be simple? Contracts have to explained to you, you have to read all the "Things You Need to Know" and then sign in triplicate (no less) and hand over your first born as collateral... I had to provide as much ID as if I was going for a passport - sigh...
Syncing your data...
Telstra have a new network, NextG (3.5G @ 850Mhz), and everything is moving to it. Nice, lots of great features and I can Bluetooth from my laptop to a new NextG phone for internet access - sweet as they say. As at this point though, its not so sweet, no Nokia phones, no handsets with explicit iSync support and in-fact the only one that supports iSync appears to be the Motorola Razr Maxx V6, and even then you need to be grateful for the efforts of David, of ClockSkew.
Word of warning though, (as at Jan 29, 2007) even with David's plug-in you will not experience 100% iSync goodness - it appears that iCal events/items have a few issues. Maybe 10.4.9 or even Leopard might bring an update that supports this phone in full.
Further setup issues...
Of course it doesn't end up there, I don't know if you find this annoying but Telstra have a really short default of 15 seconds before a call diverts to message bank. Now I realise that this is because they can charge you more money for retrieving the message and most people will not turn of the divert on no answer but couldn't they at least give you 30, 45 or even 60 seconds before sending your caller of to the bank? Luckily you can extend it out to 30 seconds and that done by punching in one of those services numbers as follows:
**61*101**30# For more details on this may I recommend the Whirlpool forum posting on the subject (which I wish I'd thought of sooner).
The other thing you may want to setup is the number you've nominated for the Bonus 24/7 service (if you've chosen it of course), the interesting thing is that I couldn't find any documentation on it anywhere apart from a Telstra staff offer, When I rang Telstra they told me I should go back to the dealer and get them to set it up for me... as there is a $3.00 charge for setup and everytime you change your nominated number, which seems a bit expensive given the following.
To set your Bonus 24/7 number simply type in 12488 followed by the number you want to get 3 minutes of free calls on. Don't forget to press the "Send" button on your phone, if you've done this correctly you'll get an SMS back telling you what phone number you've set. Probably worth checking the number you've set before pressing the send button - unless of course you're into giving $3.00 bonuses to Telstra.
124889999999999 <SEND> So in this example the number has been set to 9999 999 999 - which isn't a real number but you get the picture :)
The final trick to this bonus is that you must call 12488, from this point onwards to get the 3 minutes of free time, otherwise if you dial the number normally (ie. 9999 999 999) you will charged for a normal call at the rates you've signed up for. The easiest way to avoid calling the wrong number I've found is to assign a speed dial to 12488, that way you can't go to far wrong.
Hopefully this will get someone else along the way a bit quicker than me, and if anyone finds better version of the Maxx iSync PhonePlugIn please let me know.
