My Mobile Life

I’ve just returned today from a couple of weeks on holidays and gees, it’s nice to be home, particularly after camping for a week during the Woodford Folk Festival and then spending a few days on the road travelling to and from Sydney.

Now that I’m home I plan to get back into the swing of putting regular posts up for you on the cool little iPhone apps that I come across as well as all the little handy tips and tricks that I find.

Given that it’s the start of a new year and many of you are probably reflecting on what you want to achieve in the coming year I thought I’d post a link to another blog that I came across today. The author’s name is Jack Cheng and the post is about finding work that makes you happy (a subject I’m particularly interested in) and finding a balance between work that pays the bills and that which makes you happy. Here it is: http://www.jackcheng.com/maxing-out-your-triangle

All the best for the year ahead!

I came across this news item the other day about Internode offering free wi-fi for iPhone users. While this will most likely benefit South Australian users where Internode is based, there are a few wi-fi hotspots around other states (VIC, NSW, QLD and the NT). Check out the Internode Wireless hotspot page.

While the free wi-fi doesn’t necessarily allow you to do all that you can do normally with your iPhone it will be pretty cool for users in the right area, who either a.) have used up their existing data allowance or b.) don’t have a data plan for their phone.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been planning to put together a post comparing the iPhone plans that are currently available in Australia but it turns out APCMAG have already done it for me. I found the article today and to be honest I doubt that I could do a better job of comparing the options so check out the article for all the details.

To give you a bit of a synopsis (which might be handy for those who don’t have time to ready the whole article) it looks like Optus is providing the best value for money with some of their plans, though for heavy data users you may want to check out Virgin Mobile. Whatever you do, don’t go with Telstra (unless you live in the bush in which case it’s kinda your only option, ouch).

It’s interesting to note that 3 are offering iPhone users an incentive to purchase an iPhone with other carriers (as they don’t have a deal with Apple yet) and will give you $300 to bring the phone over to their network.

A couple things to add to what the article says. If you’re with a carrier already and don’t want to change, you may find that you can use a plan which isn’t advertised specifically as an iPhone plan and just add a data pack. This is what I did with Vodafone. So rather then going onto their cheapest iPhone plan (at $69 per month) I stayed on the $49 plan I was on which offered the same value in calls ($310 per month). I then added a 100MB data pack for $11.95 which gives me more data than I would ever realistically use (my billing month is almost up and I’ve used less than 40MB) considering I already have 3 or 4 other internet connections available at work/home, etc…

One other point that may be worth noting* is that so far Vodafone seems to be slightly better than Optus at providing customers with information about how much of your plan you’ve actually used. With Vodafone you can dial 1512 and get a breakdown of how much data you’ve used, how much of your phone allowance you have left and how much of your reward product you’ve used (i.e. Best Mate rewards such as a 100 free sms messages). Whether this is worth paying more for, I don’t know, and it may well be that other carriers will soon provide this service if they aren’t already doing so.

Note: this is from my own experience and discussions I’ve had with a friend who uses an Optus iPhone plan.

A couple of days ago I went to pay my mobile phone bill from July and while I normally do this on the web, I thought this time I’d call up. You can imagine my surprise when the digital voice on the other end of the line tells me that I have an oustanding balance of over $460. Yes, that’s right my first iPhone bill came in and it was almost 10 times what I would normally spend.

So I called up Vodafone and got them to look into it for me. In the process I had the opportunity to ask about why there are no totals in the call history (well at least none for data, something I covered in a recent post). The support person told me that even Vodafone staff have to export the list of data to Excel, and then calculate the totals using a spreadsheet. Unbelievable for a major teleco, but I figured that is what I’d do. Somewhat to my surprise however, the totals from the spreadsheet didn’t match with the figures on the bill! More confusion…

While examining the bill I realised that I had been charged full freight for each instance where I’d used data from the iPhone. Given that I’m meant to have 100MB of data to use each month, I had expected to see mostly zero’s in the cost amount next to data usage. When I pointed this out to the person on the phone they explained that I did not appear to even have a 100MB of data on my plan and this was why I had been charged the maximum rate for data usage. I was informed that I would have to fax through a copy of the contract I had signed when purchasing the phone and I resolved to do this today.

As it turns out the contract says nothing about my data plan, so I went back down to where I’d purchased the phone. Sure enough there was a record of my data plan in the notes for my account and the manager at this local Vodafone store was able to set the billing department straight on what I had signed up for. I was informed that I would receive a $126 discount to my bill. Only a slight relief considernig that still leaves me with some $335 to pay.

One handy number I have learned in the last few days through all of this, which may come in handy for other Vodafone users is 1512 (a free call from your mobile). If you call this number it gives you the details of how much of your monthly budget you have left in calls, free texts (if you chose this best mate reward option) or data usage. For Telstra and Optus users, I would recommend asking if your carrier provides a similar number or service. I’ve heard that Optus are no better than Vodafone when it comes to determining how much of your data you’ve used (via their website) so I suspect that this may be a current issue with all three providers.

I’m on the road today, heading from Canberra to Melbourne this afternoon after flying down yesterday to meet a couple of clients here. Inevitably being on the road I’m making a lot more calls on the mobile then I do when at home. So this morning I was attempting to check my data and voice usage to make sure I’m not going to exceed my allowance for the month. I jumped online via the Vodafone website, for the 2nd or 3rd time this week, trying to do this. The last time was a couple days ago after a short visit to the Vodafone store where I’d asked them to check my usage but was turned away after being told that they didn’t have access to anything other then the public website to do this. They would’ve checked my usage there for me but the website was down and it was the same story when I tried to check it myself an hour later.

So I was somewhat pleased just to be able to get on to the website today, though I wasn’t overly hopeful of getting access to useful figures after the number of attempts I’d made at this in the last couple weeks. When you login and go to your account, you can get to a Bill History screen that shows you the Longest calls which includes your data calls (i.e. browser sessions and downloads) and I eventually worked out how to see my calls and data usage via the Call details screen. However there did not appear to be anywhere to see total data usage for the month (I currently have a 100MB download limit) or to see details on how much of my Best Mate entitlements I’ve used. Best Mate is a Vodafone offering which gives you a number of optional rewards/freebies. I chose the 100 free text messages, which is great, however it would be nice to see how many I’ve sent without having to go through 41 pages of data and work it out myself.

From what I’ve heard Optus has similar issues with allowing you to see your usage and entitlements and I suspect Telstra users might have a similar story. A part of me wants to give the Telco’s the benefit of the doubt and say that they’ll get these issues sorted out and that this has to do with the fact that many of the iPhone plans are new, etc… however I suspect that mobile phones have been around long enough that it shouldn’t be like this anymore. In any case I think we’d all like to see these services improved and a little more transparency from the providers when it comes to our mobile accounts.