Jonathan R. Pritchard’s Homepage

I’d like to thank Richard Hutchinson, Team Leader at Orange UK’s telephone services, for settling a dispute over a faulty Sony Ericsson W910i.

The phone failed prematurely within the 6 month period which is protected under the Sale of Goods Act 1979 (as amended) which states that a fault within 6 months is presumed to have been present at sale and therefore replacement must be issued.

I find it really disappointing and frustrating however that Orange UK, which appears to be an ethical and caring company on the face of things (Orange Wednesdays, Orange Film etc.) is so hard-nosed and stupid when it comes down to customer loyalty. Six people I know have signed up to Orange because of recommendations from friends and the collective spending power of small families alone is enough to justify correct business behaviour.

Why cut off your nose to spite your face? That is what Orange UK appear to be doing at times. I’ve been a customer for 8 years personally, I’m not sure how many thousands of pounds that add up to. Mobile phones are a competitive market and Orange UK aren’t seeming very competitive on such things as unlimited data plans and usage of 3G enabled mobile phones as laptop modems.

They want to stiff you for every penny you’ve got. If you sell someone a faulty good, you should expect to replace it without charge to the user. If their claim falls outside of your warranty but is still within manufacturers warranty you should be an intermediary for them and offer to waive the delivery charges - that’s good sense. As Mr. Hutchinson’s colleague said to me “we don’t sell you a phone, we sell you the airtime. We give you the phone to use the air time”. Legalese and loopholes like that should be highlighted by the mass media much more. Hold these companies to account.

It’s the small things with Orange like having to pay to listen to voice mail, like having to pay 35p for an Orange Wednesday text. Like being charged for magic numbers on pay-as-you-go even if the other person doesn’t pick up. That’s unfortunate.

Thanks again. However I shall be thinking whether to exercise my right as a consumer to go elsewhere in future - that’s the beauty of the free market. Don’t deliver and you won’t win the contract.

It is criminal in my opinion for gaming devices, which are ever more popular, to support such lowly encryption methods as only WEP - which has been thoroughly hacked over and over again and is useless. All WEP encryption will stop is the man sitting outside your house in his car, typing away on his laptop, not even that really if he has any sense he can crack the key in under 15 minutes.

Related to this is the Wii, Nintendo DS and Sony PSP’s support of only 802.11b. The 802.11g protocol had been aroung long before the release of these devices yet they didn’t see fit to support this higher bandwidth protocol.

I argue that security features like this are far more important than parental controls. Having to downgrade one’s wireless security setup to something inferior such as WEP to have it supported by all devices is a terrible situation akin to being between a rock and a hard place. Do you want to lose functionality or do you want to lose security - you simply should never be put in this position by a responsible company. If this was a business grade product then it would not have been tolerated.

At least the Nintendo Wii supports WPA2-PSK (AES) but it’s far from an ideal situation. You have to sacrifice speed of the overall network to run in mixed mode and not 802.11g only mode.

Why are all the studios turning to Blu-Ray? I will never buy into proprietary crap formats like that, that aren’t backwards compatible. I hope nobody else does, but as a lot of people are saying. Now Warner’s turned to Blu-ray solely, HD-DVD’s death knell is not far off.

I don’t understand this. Why? Why is Nintendo the worst tech company for the environment. Surely the fact that Nintendo Wii consumes less power than the likes of Xbox 360 and Sony Playstation 3 means that it’s a very green product indeed. Yes it is meant to be always on, but consuming a very small amount of power, plus it’s not just needlessly on, it updates “Channels” in the background.

I should think Nintendo certainly bests Apple or Sony or indeed Microsoft on many levels. Show me the evidence.