Technology

I've been annoyed this week. Annoyed by stupid decisions. Not mine, but companies selling technology.

Firstly, vodafone. They do a pay and go dongle that to my mind was the best package on the market if you wanted to have some broadband on the go. £15 bought you 1Gb of data and that stayed on the account until you had used 1Gb of data, regardless of whether you used that in a week or 6 months. For someone who uses the mobile broadband on an infrequent basis this is brilliant. Unfortunately they've now stopped this and, like all the other providers, that £15 now expires after 30 days. To compensate, they've upped the amount of data that you get, so £15 now gets you 3Gb. Which is obviously helpful to the person who uses it now and again so 1Gb would last them a couple of months. I should point out that if the dongle was bought and activated before last christmas it'll still be on the previous plan. So ultimately this new plan doesn't affect me directly. Except for the little issue that I currently have on dongle shared with my fiancee. It is not being topped up often as we don't make a lot of use of it. But it's great to know it's there and we can use it, whether it's weekly or monthly, which frankly depends on the week or month. However, what if it starts to become common that we both need it on the same day? What then? Because I can now no longer go buy a spare dongle without needing to top it up every 30 days!

I understand from a business perspective that Vodafone would naturally be more inclined to have people topping up more often. It's a shame though, because they were the only providers for those of us who want to occasionally use the interweb out on the road. I certainly wouldn't want to have to top up every month only to see half my credit disappear unused because I didn't need to log on that often this month.

What's more aggravating is hearing of a case where someone still on the old plan of non-evaporating credit was told by Vodafone that the new terms meant she had lost her remaining balance. Which muddies the waters a bit. Are old plans being altered to the new one? If so why haven't Vodafone informed customers. It took a lot of searching to confirm the new plan, I'd have thought that if they were changing existing customers to this new situation that there'd have been some outrage. (Possibly no-ones been able to express their outrage as their credit's gone?!) If they haven't automatically changed people over then why would their customer services say they had? It's a frustrating mixed message. I've been trying to contact Vodafone myself to clarify, but not had a response as yet.

Now, silly tech decision number 2 this week. My brother recently got a Blu-ray player. He already has a surround system, so was looking forward to getting this wired up for some hi-def, awesome sounding viewing of Die Hard. But couldn't seem to find the digital in socket on his surround. So this week I popped round to his to have a look.

Yep, there's no digital in socket.

Who makes a surround system but doesn't let you plug in other sound sources? Who?? Phillips do.

Yes he can plug in stereo phono's but that's kind of missing the full range available. The system is capable of Digital DTS 5.1 as it has it's own inbuilt DVD player with this capability. And it's a recent system. I've had a Blu-Ray player longer than this system's been built. They really thought that no-one would want to plug a blu-ray in? Seriously? It has an HDMI out and upscales. So clearly they thought this system should appeal to people with a desire for better than DVD quality. But adding one extra optical in socket was too much?

I mean I understand if you go and buy one of those £15 DVD players in the supermarket that you shouldn't expect a digital out socket. But if you're buying a surround sound system, do they really think that you'll never want to plug in another source??

I suppose you could say that careful inspection of the specs before purchase then buy a system that does have it, etc. It just seems like such an obvious inclusion on a surround system though.

Anyway, that's my rant over. I actually feel a bit silly about the surround one, as it's more about my own assumptions than a real fault on Phillips part. I have a Phillips surround system myself and love it.