The Big 18-Month Mobile Contract Scam

If you buy a new mobile phone contract in the UK these days, chances are that the sales person you are going to talk to will try to sell you an 18 month contract rather than a 12 month one. Be extremely careful before you decide to take such a contract. Perks will include a free mobile phone and a slightly cheaper contract than the shorter one. The downside is that you can only upgrade your handset after 18 months rather than 12. Not a major problem you may think if you are not the type who needs the latest handset as soon as it comes out.

Think again. And ask the sales person what is the length of the manufacturer's warranty on the handset. Chances are, the warranty for the handset is 12 months. If your handset starts malfunctioning through no fault of your own while it is under warranty, or once you are eligible for an upgrade, the provider will replace it at no cost to you. However, if your handset plays up after the warranty has expired but before you are eligible for an upgrade, that is during the last 6 months of a typical 18 month contract, then the provider will not replace the handset and you will have to buy one yourself at full market price.

Of course all this is explained in the small print of your contract but no sales person will mention it to you without prompting. So don't forget to ask and if the warranty on the handset expires before you are eligible for an upgrade, don't take the contract.

I just got bitten by that interesting loophole with Vodafone and am now left with a malfunctioning handset for the last 3 months of my contract. Luckily the fault is not debilitating, it just means that the handset occasionally restarts while in the middle of a call, cutting the call short. Not a complete failure then, but still extremely annoying. Evidently, the second my current contract expires, I will go shopping around for a new contract and I will only stay with my current provider if they can offer me a significantly better deal than the competition.

As Vodafone's support told me, everybody else does the same because the handset's warranty is set by the manufacturer, not the network and they have no say in this. Well, maybe they should talk to the manufacturers and solve this loophole. The reason why it should be solved is because the handset is bundled with the contract. You don't buy the handset, you buy a contract to provide you with mobile phone services and you are given a handset as part of that contract to enable you to connect to the service. The cost of the handset is then included in the price you pay for the service and it should be completely covered by the service agreement for the duration of that agreement. In the case where you buy the handset separately, you buy a service and an electronic device to use with this service, there are two separate transactions and it is therefore sensible to treat them separately. Not when the handset is bundled with the service.

I may be barking at the wrong tree but I will definitely contact the Office of Fair Trading and ask them whether this practice is actually fair. I shall update this blog when I have an answer.

Bad Interface Design

Apple Computers are reknown for some of the best user interfaces. Like everybody else, they can occasionally get it wrong. I just had an amusing example of this. If you go to the HSBC web site and download any of their PDF documents such as their terms and conditions, you will notice that there is a slight bug that adds ;jsessionid= followed by a lot of gobbledygook at the end of the file name, after the extension, thus producing a file with an unusually long extension that OS-X doesn't recognise. So the first thing you'd want to do is change that file name and remove all the jsessionid malarkey at the end of the file name. When you do that, OS-X thinks you want to change the extension and are in risk of ending up with a file name it can't handle automatically. So it warns you and asks if you really want to do this, assuming you don't, as shown below:

Error dialogue with inaccessible button

In this example, you can just about see the other button pushed all the way left and therefore click on it as you really, really want to change that extension. But if you had just one more letter or if you changed the j in the ID for an M, the right button would be that little bit much wider and the left button would completely disappear. As you can't change the dialogue window's size, you're stuffed and you have no choice but to click on the highlighted button and leave your file name as is. The only way I found around this is to open the terminal and use the command line to change the name. That's one thing that OS-X has going for it: as it's UNIX underneath, you can always bypass the user interface when it gets in the way. On the other hand, that's not something that is very accessible to the average user.

There are a couple of solutions that Apple could apply to their dialogue boxes when such a problem occurs:

• make the dialogue window's resizable and/or scrollable;
• extend the window accordingly, although you'd get the same problem if you got to stupid extension lengths as long as the width of the screen;
• make the buttons stack up and extend the window vertically.

The moral of the story is: when designing user interfaces, test them with very stupid values that make it break. Someone is bound to use such values one day or another, if only by accident.

Big Brother Sam

Wired News have an interesting article about screening at American airports and the type of information they collect. This strengthens my resolution not to fly to the United States until further notice. Not that I have anything to fear from such screening but I really think this is going too far. It looks like Uncle Sam is more and more turning into Big Brother Sam!

Word of the Day

Dictionary.com's word of the day is potboiler. No, I didn't know it either. There you go, you learn something new every day.

Cheap Taxi

I arrived in Sofia yesterday morning. The first thing I needed to do was find a hotel. James, whom I had met on the train already had one booked so we decided to go to his hotel and drop the bags there. If they had an extra room free for me, that'd be ideal, otherwise I'd go looking but without having to lug the bags around.

The first thing we did was have a coffee and pull out the map I had bought in Belgrade to have an idea where his hotel was. We found it easily right in the centre and estimated it was about 2 kilometres from the train station. That was easily walkable but we decided we really didn't want to carry the bags and we'd take a taxi. So once the coffee paid for, we went to the taxi rank.

As soon as we got to the taxi rank, we were approached by a guy who asked if we wanted a cheap taxi. Smelling a trap we asked how much it would be to the address we wanted to go to. He immediately answered 10 Euro, pulling his it's-very-far-away-you-know face. Even in London, they wouldn't attempt to charge you that much for a distance you could walk! We thanked him and went to an official taxi. We were in front of the hotel some 10 minutes later and got charged 4 Leva: 2 Euro.

Moral of the story: unlicensed taxi drivers have an interesting understanding of the word cheap.

Linguistic Gymnastics

If you ever want to learn Serbian, the good news is that it is a phonetic language: if you can read it, you can speak it and vice versa. The bad news is that is can be written using either the Latin or the Cyrillic alphabet so you may see signs in both scripts. For instance, Thank you can be written Hvala or Хвала. It can get very confusing when you have a map that uses the Latin alphabet but the street signs are all in Cyrillic. Then the even worse news is that Serbian extends both alphabets with extra letters that don't exist in the standard versions of either, such as Đ in the Latin script or Љ in the Cyrillic one. And then comes the practical question: what dictionary order is used? The Latin and Cyrillic alphabets have different dictionary orders so does it mean that when you buy a dictionary, the order the words are in depends on the alphabet it is published in? I'm not sure I want to know the answer.

Impossible Connection

Sometimes you meet someone in the weirdest of situations and realise that you have the most unexpected of connections. Last night at the Belgrade Beer Fest, I met a couple of Serbian guys when we started discussing the blueberry flavoured beer I had just bought. Of course, they eventually asked me where I came from. When I said France, one of them asked me to be more precise. So I said I came from Brest, fully expecting to have to explain where it was. To my surprise, he said that he had been there. But the most surprising is the reason he went there: he just loved the poem Barbara from Jacques Prévert and wanted to see the town the poem was about so one day he was in France visiting family, he went all the way to Brest. How cool is that?

Off the Map Again

I thought that being unable to find maps of Belgrade when in Budapest was weird. Well, the same happens in Belgrade: nearly impossible to find a map of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, even though Serbia and Bulgaria share a border. You can easily find guide books and maps to go to the other end of the world or to war zones like Sudan but you can't find a map of the capital city of a neighbour country. I eventually succeeded in finding what I think was the one map in town after visiting half a dozen book stores.

When I questioned this state of affairs in Budapest, I was told by a friend that nobody ever went to Belgrade. Having now been there, I can confirm that Hungarians are very misguided: Belgrade is definitely worth visiting! So is it the same problem here about Sofia? Nobody ever goes there? And if yes, are Serbians misguided about their neighbour? I shall discover that tomorrow. Or is this attitude just the remnants of old conflicts between those countries that share a complex history?

Also, just for the record, Google Maps doesn't fare any better in providing a map of Sofia than it does in providing one of Belgrade: you just get a big grey blob labelled София.

Serbian Border Controls

I got a fairly harsh reminder last night that Serbia is not part of the European Union. I was travelling on a night train from Budapest to Belgrade and there were six of us in the compartment, including a Greek couple who were going back home from Vienna. On the way out they had flown so no problem there. On the way back, they missed their flight and decided to travel by train rather than pay for a new plane ticket. To do this they needed to physically travel through Serbia and Macedonia. When Serbian border guards came on board they asked for passports. The guy had his but the girl only had a national ID card, as it is enough to travel all through the European Union. Unfortunately, that didn't cut it with the Serbian officials and they were asked off the train. I hope they found a way to get home and are not stuck in the middle of nowhere. So, when travelling to the Balkans, take your passport with you.

Off the Beaten Track

You know you're heading off the beaten track when it starts becoming difficult to find information on your destination. I am taking a night train to Belgrade tonight. That was easy: there are two trains a day from Budapest and it is easy to buy a ticket. You would expect a few more trains considering Serbia and Hungary share a border but two is better than nothing. Now finding a hotel was quite a challenge. Hotels.com has as choice of 4 while lastminute.com doesn't even have Serbia (nor Yugoslavia) listed in its list of countries. I eventually found one through a Serbian booking site (thank you, Google). I then wanted to have a look at a map of Belgrade so went to Google Maps to find... er... a big grey blob with the word Beograd in the middle of it (no thanks, Google). So 10 minutes ago, I stopped at a large bookshop in the hope of finding some sort of guide book or at least a map. They had one map. And when I say one, it's one copy. Now that I bought it, nobody can find anything on Belgrade in this shop anymore. They actually had more info on Baghdad! To top it off, my Lonely Planet phrase book for Eastern Europe is tellingly missing Serbian.

The next stop in my travels may prove interesting.