HTC Smart On 02 Pt 2

In the previous part I talked about my new HTC Smart on O2. This post deals with the O2 specific issues around it. Due to my location I only get a consistent signal from O2. I am too high up, I believe I am higher than most transmitters, which are all pointed horizontal and downwards. With all of the others I have to press myself against the window to get a signal, which drops out if I step more than a foot away. Luckily then that the HTC Smart is available on O2. It is in fact an O2 exclusive. Life is not all rosey with the O2 side of the deal however. O2 strike me as kinda disingenuous on several points.

Misleading Prices

When the price tag says £90 how much do you think you'd have to pay to be able to walk out the door with the product? £90 right? Guess again, there's a mandatory £10 top up when you buy a Pay&Go phone. This means the price is £100, despite having £90 on the tag. To be fair, this at least is call credit you'd use anyway so it's not as bad as it could have been. It is still dishonest pricing however.

Misleading Terms

O2 recently announced they'd be dropping the unlimited data plan for smartphones. The problem was that this was never "unlimited" in anything other than name. It's capped by a fair use policy at 500mb per month. I understand the reasoning behind limits, but at least be honest and don't advertise it as unlimited when it has limits.

Email Not Supported On Pay&Go

Notice how O2 go out of their way to tell you that a Pay&Go smartphone won't allow you to email? No neither did I. I only found out after I called the help line to figure out why my email was receiving but not sending to be told "email is not supported on Pay&Go". It comes down to email ports being blocked.

Given that the HTC Smart is an O2 exclusive, you'd think the email function of the phone would be deceiving if they don't support it on O2 Pay&Go. Perhaps a more honest approach would be to remove that feature and icon or at least mention it in the features list.

I do have a Googlemail account which sends and receives from the HTC Smart so it's not the end of the world, and I've never had a phone capable of email before so it's not like I'm missing anything I haven't had before. I was trying to move away from Googlemail but it seems I'm stuck with it from the phone at least.

The 90's Called, It Wants It's Internet Back

While the HTC Smart is a low spec phone, with a slow CPU etc the browsing speed feels incredibly slow. It can take several minutes to load a simple page like Google.com. It reminds me of the days when I was on dial up, and dial up feels like broadbamd compared to the speed of the O2 network. How much of this is down to the minimal spec of the HTC Smart and how much is down to O2's network or the data soaking high end phones like iPhones I don't know. All I can say is that surfing on the HTC Smart with O2 is horrible. I'd imagine the 5mb max cache has a lot to do with this.

Conclusion & Some Loose Ends

Despite the shortcomings of both the HTC Smart and O2 I like my new phone. Sure I wish it did more, but it does everything I wanted it to do with a few minor modifications. I'm using my Googlemail email instead of my regular one.

I have set up a new Twitter account called Drupalised to chat back and forth while on the move. I was posting to Identi.ca which in turn reposts to Twitter. I had hoped I could set that up the other way since the HTC Smart only has Twitter and Facebook but Twitter being Twitter can't do that. So if I used my ThistleWeb account it would cause some fragmentation in data, so I decided to keep them separate.

I do not nameshift, nor pretend to be anyone else. Both accounts are the same avatar, name and homepage (this one). I'm not switching accounts, I use both. My regular one comes from my desktop or netbook PC while my new one only comes from my new phone; so I apologise in advance for typos.

For those who are curious, the name Drupalised is about Drupal, and how I think of web ideas starting with the base station of "how do I do this in Drupal?" Or "how do I Drupalise this idea?" This site is a proud Drupal site.

Maybe a year or two from now I'll move up to a high end Android smartphone, but for now my needs are met by the HTC Smart on O2. Even when I upgrade I'm still limited to O2 because of my location.