No Blogging Thru Orange

I don't normally do massive rants, but I'm gonna make an exception for this as it's quite thoroughly been getting on my bits for the last few days.

I've been a customer of O2 for years now, but due to a few massive bills and a general rethink I've decided to switch to Orange. Now most of you would think this should be a relatively easy process... nah not for me. Through a combination of my own stupidity and Orange's idiotic policys I'm stuck in a bit of a limbo at the moment. All whilst paying 2 contracts :-( I shall explain:

As you can guess I use my phone to update this blog on a semi-regular basis (Wish I updated more often to be honest), this therefor makes my selection of mobile somewhat dependant on this feature (Sad I know). Now I've got a particular liking for Sony Ericsson phones, and a dislike for Nokia, so my choices of mobile upgrades are somewhat limited, The last phone I got was a W850 and quite frankly I love it, it's got the blogging feature built in, along with an in built Walkman, 3G and the design has a slide out keypad. The new model I wanted to upgrade to is a W910, a considerable improvement on the W850's size and with pretty much the same functionality... according to Sony Ericssons Website (And customer support).

I did my homework and discovered that the W910 (Thru using it at a Phones 4U shop) has the blogging feature in an identical place to the W850. So off i trundled to get the phone (Sadly Phones 4U couldn't supply it on Orange)... I was going to get it at Carphone Warehouse, but as per usual they were extremely understaffed and overcrowded... so I walked on to the Orange shop... where better to but it than the shop owned by the operator I thought... big mistake. In hindsight I should have gone to Carphone Warehouse.

Now everyone knows that each mobile provider pre-loads software to each phone to customize it for their network, I have no disagreement with this in principle... except when it removes functionality from the phone. Now I was pretty much the perfect customer, I knew what phone I wanted, the tariff, all the sales girl had to do was run it thru the till. I asked at the last minute tho... has the software been mucked about with... the answer was simple: "yes... but just to add this little short cut menu, which you can diasble", "excellent" I replied. What I should have said is, can I see... or even better... can you prove the blogging feature works. Because, much to my annoyance when I got home, I discovered that the feature had been replaced with the ability to upload photos to the orange website. Not what I wanted, not what Sony had said it does, nor what I'd seen it doing on a Vodaphone programmed version of the phone.

So I set out to find out how I could fix this... the only way is to have the phone re-flashed with generic GSM software (IE Not the Orange software, but the original un-modified Sony Ericsson software) or swap the phone for one already like this. I phoned Sony Ericsson and they told me that they were not allowed to program it with anything other than the network software it was shipped with. So off I went to return the phone to the Orange shop (As I'd been told that Carphone Warehouse sold it in the GSM generic state).

Now It was highlighted to me when I bought it that there was no 14 day returns policy on Orange Phones anymore, but I thought I' try my luck on the "miss-selling" aspect of a function being disabled on my phone. No dice, "you can't return it" says the manager. So Off I go to call Orange and find out what they say... now I've had conflicting messages, so I'm not sure what the truth is, but as I understood it all contracts have a 7 day "cooling off" period. Different Orange departments uphold and deny this, so I speak to a guy that says "you can return it to the shop... if you have a problem get them to call me", so off I go again, 2hrs I spent in the Orange shop, with the duty manager saying can't cancel the contract.

Only thing I can do is write to Orange's complaints department and tell them what has happened. Hopefully they'll listen and allow me to return the phone and buy it from Carphone Warehouse as a generic GSM version. However I doubt it.

I'll, update on this when I hear from them.

Irony of irony's that if I'd queued up in Carphone Warehouse I'd never be suffering with this problem... as I'd have been sold a generic GSM version. Not to mention that Carphone Warehouse operate a 14 day returns policy too.

I do however have several contingency plans... my best friend Matt works for Vodaphone, and hopefully they'll get the firmware flash for it sometime soon. 2nd is that I can at least blog via MMS and my old O2 contract.