Thursday, January 11, 2007

It's a Sony :)


I love my new Sony K800i mobile phone.

I can email, take photos, videos, browse the net, watch Fox-Tel, listen to the radio and use it as an MP3 player. Mine came with a 500mb memory stick, and a nifty little adapter so you can plug the stick into your laptop.

I have two gripes:

GRIPE 1. The softwae that comes with it is useless. This bloatware is almost 50mb to download. It fails to install, with heaps of DLL errors. Gives errors when you uninstall it, blurts out wierd pop-up messages in chinese when I reboot my machine, and renders the phone unusable when connected to the laptop via USB.

SOLUTION 1. A FANTASTIC program called MyPhoneExplorer - it's free, only 2mb in size, installs with no problems, does everything the Sony software pretends to do and more, and is easy to use. It even has a great utility where you can use your computer keyboard to navigate around the phone rather than pressing the small keys on the phone. If you download it and like it, don't forget to send a donation to the author. He accepts paypal.

GRIPE 2. Telstra. It took 18 hours to get my new 3G Sim Card activated. While they were doing that, by messagebank service died. I tried phoning them 4 times, each time on the phone for 30 to 40 minutes. On 3 of those occastions they cut me off after 30 minutes.

SOLUTION 2. Any suggestions? I won't touch Optus with a barge-pole because they're majority owned by the Singapore government who has the nasty habit of executing people by hanging. I don't know anything about Voda, 3 or AAPT. Telstra is sort of like an alcoholic uncle. You don't like him very much, he does nasty things, but you're worried if you swap him for someone else's uncle you might end up with someone even worse.

1 comment:

ebaybloos said...

Hey, Thanks for this great tip.
My mate has a k800i and we had a bugger of a time with their 50 megs of crud too.
Eventually found a link to the bare drivers from sony's software...

webpage: (http://www.monblog.ch/port80/?p=200610261516196)
file link: (http://www.nxtg.net/files/sony-ericsson-k-series-drivers.zip)

...which worked on a mass storage level but this 'MyPhoneExplorer' sounds like a much nicer solution.

I'll give it a go. :-)

RE: Solution 2: LOL@Helstra

I'm not a big mobile user but my mobs still stuck with Tel$tra.
Kicked them for home phone though. Got in on the Virgin Broadband + Home phone deal before they 'padded' their profit margins.
I'm not a Virgin fanboi but their broadband bundle WAS good value and if/when I switch my mobile to them too I can call myself from home for free... hmm... or someone at home can anyway. :-|

*note though: Virgin mobile/internet is owned by Optus so I guess I'm funding Singapore's rope supplies.
*note 2: Their customer service at present is WOEfull!!

Be brave about turning uncle Telsta away though, I've heard sometime's he comes back offering baskets of gold. :-)

PS, I posted a reply to your LW70 heat issues from back in December 06. Hope you've still got the LG.

Cheers.