Categories
End User phones

This iPhone is dead

dead iPhone 4S
This iPhone is deceased, dead, non-functional, lifeless, no longer functional, not of this world, sent its last packet, kaput, a gonner, calls no more, textless, will not switch on, pushing up Apple seedlings.

Wife dropped her iPhone last night. It no longer works. I have mobile phone insurance with my Lloyds Bank account but it is a time consuming process. I entered all the data online but they wanted me to print a local copy, sign it and send it in the post. They do promise a quick turnaround for a decision – 1 working day – but I will then have to wait for them to send me the wherewithal to send the phone off for them to decide whether it can be repaired. The turnaround for this is said to be 5 working days from receipt of the phone.

All in all I can’t see her getting a new phone inside 2 weeks. She is a Timico customer and Timico could deliver her a new handset within 24 hours, or I could even pick it up from stores and take it home. However that is not how my personal insurance works.

When I made the claim I went through the online banking’s two stage authentication to access the portal. Everything bar the proof of purchase was entered online & I could easily have uploaded a PDF of the contract when filling out their forms. It’s hard to see what additional value my signing the form offers when one considers the delay that the process introduces into the system. The credentials for logging into the portal are known only to me and are just as good a contractual validation of my claim as my signature, which could easily be faked anyway if someone really wanted to do it.

So now we wait…

PS in the meantime she has been forced to borrow my Nokia Lumia 920 which I suggested with trepidation. It isn’t going to be particularly easy for someone who is used to the iPhone to adjust to the less good UI of the Nokia but she was desperate – texts are her communications lifeblood and that is the only other phone I have. Ah well!

Categories
End User mobile connectivity phones

Ice cream sandwiches, fruit and toiletries – a review of the Samsung Nexus?

stay cool with an Ice Cream Sandwich from Google?When I was a kid the summers were always unbearably hot (and it always snowed at Christmas). We would turn on the hosepipe in the back garden, fill the paddling pool and splash about showering each other with jets of water. Sometimes the ice cream van would come round and hearing the music we would all run outside and line up to choose a cooling treat.

Usually I’d go for a “wafer”. The man in the van would cut a slice off a block of ice cream and sandwich it between two wafers. Then I would lick the ice cream in the middle until it got smaller and smaller and the wafer got soggier and soggier and I eventually had to eat the lot.

They stopped selling wafers for some reason. Health and safety probably or some commercial packaging business case that said it wasn’t economic. I don’t know.

Now I was excited to hear that they were bringing back the Ice Cream Sandwich. Ooo I thought.