On the iPhone page on O2.ie, they describe and give an outline of what they call the “O2 Experience Plus” tariff.

Regarding data, they say that it’s 99c per day for data usage (1c per KB up to a max charge of 99c). If I so much as breathe on the 3G network, I’ll be pretty much up to the maximum charge. Do O2 offer any data plans similar to Three’s offering? The apparent “stealth” charge of €30 a month doesn’t really appeal to me.

In the way of texts, the tariff boasts free texts and calls to the O2 Network if I top up by €20 per month. The only problem there is that myself and everyone else I knew on O2 jumped off that ship years a go when the other operators introduced great offers while O2 continued to do nothing but screw us as if we were 12 year old virgins. So this tariff is pretty much useless to me given it’s 13c to send texts to other networks and I’m pretty sure that’s more expensive than it was to send texts back when I was on this sorry excuse for a network a whole two years a go and it’s also 5 times dearer than what I’m currently paying!

Now if I navigate outside of the iPhone subsection of the O2 site, I can see information about the O2 Experience More plan which offers Free texts to all Irish networks if I top up by €20 or more per month. Now they mention nothing about this tariff on the iPhone subsection, is this because it isn’t available for iPhone customers or because they don’t really want to us advertise this superior tariff to us gullible and naive interested buyers? Or perhaps the folks at O2 don’t know their arse from their elbow when it comes to designing informative and usable websites?

They also mention nothing about Text Bundles in the iPhone subsection. I’d hope they’re available but working on the assumption that they aren’t and based off a realistic guess that I’d send 600 texts a month, I’d be liable to spend €78 on texts alone every month. I’ll take a conservative approach with phone calls and say that I’d spend 3 minutes talking every day which adds up to €27 a month. This is all on top of the €30 I’d be charged for data usage and all of a sudden I see I’m paying €135 a month which is over 4 times what I’m currently paying on Three with my INQ1.

If I include the cost of buying the phone itself, it works out as costing €2190 over a twelve month period to use the phone without restricting myself. Yet despite this ****ing astronomical cost, the iPhone’s beautiful interface and massive array of apps still appeal to me but then again I just can’t get that 4 figure cost out of my head and it’s there that this entire journey grinds to a halt.

I’m a student and simply can’t justify spending that much money in a year on anything other than alcohol. Am I a mile off with my estimates or am I on the right track? Does Bill Pay offer any notable benefits over Speakeasy other than the lower cost of the phone? Finally, given that I’m currently on Three, is there any possibility of unlocking an iPhone and being able to use it on Three without features being crippled?

F’kin iPhone!

I was going to write a rather lengthy review of it. But put simply, there’s no need to write a review about a phone which has already picked up numerous awards and won over the hearts and souls of anyone who has been brave enough to take a leap of fate with a companies very first phone to the market! It really is that damn good!

Three have made a big deal out of the Facebook integration. It’s hard to fault it really, as it allows one touch access to all the functions of the fastest growing social network. There is one thing better than “one touch access” though and that’s “no touch access”! And through the INQs handy widget feature, this is possible.

As it stands, there’s no widgets available for download on the INQ. At least not in Ireland anyway. We can add up to 3 RSS feeds to be included on the Home screen though, and this is where we’re given the opportunity to add a Facebook related widget. Facebook might not advertise their RSS feeds very well, but they are there, at least in some sections of their site. By adding them, we can have up to the minute (well, up the hour) updates about our friends statuses and our own notifications. It all sounds good, doesn’t it? Now lets find those feeds.

First we’ll add find the “Notifications” feed. This feed lets you know of any changes to your profile, such as new friend requests, new profile comments and application related messages. To find it, go to the Notifications page. You won’t be able to access it unless you’re logged in, so make sure you are before clicking! Once we’re there, you’ll see a heading in one of the sidebars called “Subscribe to Notifications”. Right click the link that’s directly below this and copy the address and paste it somewhere where you can see it later (a Word or Notepad document for example)

Now we have to find the Status Updates feed. Click on the “Friends” link at the top of the page which will bring you to the Status Updates page. Look for the header “Subscribe” and once again right click the link that’s directly below this and copy the address and paste it to the same place as you did the first feed. You now have everything to need to start feeding this all this data onto your phone.

There are two ways you can proceed from here. You can either follow this guide which will show you how to set up two seperate widgets that will update every hour, or you can be inventive and use what’s known as a feed merging service such as Yahoo! Pipes. The advantage of using a feed mixer is that you’ll only have one feed for all notifications and status updates which will free up space on the screen. The disadvantage is that many of websites that provide these services go down often meaning you’ll be finding yourself constantly looking for alternatives. Yahoo! Pipes is probably the most reliable of them all, but it’s not the most user friendly piece of kit and would take twice the length of this guide to explain properly!

Anyway, we’ll carry on. Assuming you have the addresses of the two feeds pasted into a window somewhere, we can now add the feeds to the phone. Hit the “Menu” button of the phone and scroll to “Feeds”. Hit “options” and select “Add a feed”. In the screen that appears, manually enter in the Feed address, making sure you don’t make any mistakes. Once the feed is added, update it when prompted. Now we’ll set it to update every hour. Go into “Options” once again and select “Auto Update”. Select “Once an Hour” from the options. This ensures that the feed is kept as up to date as possible. To add the other feed, simply repeat the steps of creating a new feed and entering it’s address.

Once both feeds are added, go back into the main menu and select “Tools”. From here we select “manage widgets”. Mark the boxes “RSS Widget 1″ and “RSS Widget 2″ (if you intend on adding both feeds) and hit “Done”. Go back into the Home screen (this is the desktop of the phone) and select the newly added widgets that are prompting you to “Add a Feed”. Select one of the feeds from the list and click done. If you want to add the second feed, simply select the other widget and add the remaining feed to it.

If everything has worked properly, you’ll now find yourself with 2 widgets on the Home screen, both relating to Facebook. One of them lists your friends 10 most recent status changes (eg: Adam is tired), while the other one is solely for notifications (eg: Adam has wrote on your wall). They’ll both be set to update every hour which should be regularly enough to keep you informed of everything Facebook related – unless you’re completely addicted.

If you want a little bit more from them, then I’d recommend you check out Yahoo! Pipes to really have fun with the feeds! If you’re having any problems, leave me a comment and I’ll try help!

Just a little word of warning to finish this piece off. Unless you’re on a Data plan, you’ll probably be charged through the teeth for refreshing these feeds every hour. If ever there was a phone that needed a data package, this is it!

Anyway, while I was “dancing”, my almost brand new Atom Life phone slipped out of my pocket while I was in midair and came back down to earth with a crunch! For those of you who aren’t familiar with this phone, think of it as the perfect portable media player, the perfect texting tool and the perfect mobile internet surfer.. it’s a pretty decent phone too! The stylus (pull out tool for the touch screen) went flying across the dancefloor, but I didn’t give a crap about the worthless piece of metal and only cared for the €320 phone which upon closer inspection I found had its TFT screen turned into an illegible black and white mess! Sick!

I’ve sent off an email to the manufacturer saying that the screen slowly stopped working properly. Hopefully they’ll believe me, or feel sorry for me and will repair it free of charge. It’s well within warranty after all, but I suppose the warranty doesn’t cover me for it falling from about 6ft onto the ground! I’ll just have to wait and see!