phone

Phones and Phone Companies

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Answering Services

Many business find that answering services are worth their time; even many universities use or have their own answering services for their telephone needs. You can review various answering services online before you choose one for your business. +

Phone Usability

Adam Rosi-Kessel mentioned mobile phone design principles. The Motorola in the comments sounds a bit like the ancient L7089 I use, apart from the volume buttons don't beep when sound is off. I wish I could hack the firmware on it to fix a few of the more annoying bugs, like the 'make a noise to be quiet' stuff. On the plus side, it can map voice tags to menu options and the phone book, it switches off silently, it has decent-size keys and display text.

I hate Nokias. Every model I've ever seen or used has keypads which are far too small and flat to ever be usable.

Is there good design and easy hacking out there in mobile phones?

Phone Companies and bad selling

Martyn is having trouble with Orange and their minions over his mobile phone. I've had trouble with British Telecom (and again) following leaving them in 2004.

I'm not writing more about it yet, because it's still ongoing, but I'm also having trouble with the company I moved to after BT, who used a similar sharp contract renewal practice to the one troubling Martyn, as far as I can tell. I do have a good solution for fixed lines and I'll write more here once it's ready.

My advice to anyone who finds themselves on the receiving end of these bad contract attempts: Get leaflet OFT 143 on Unfair Contract Terms from the Office of Fair Trading web site. If you've never had details of the minimum term of the contact, it's probably void.

Finally, if you want a better mobile phone deal, try the Consumer Association's Switch with Which site.

Martyn succeeded in getting away from Orange...

BT's bad marketing, 2006 edition

You may remember that I've had trouble with BT's junk mail (twice) following leaving them in 2004. As mentioned in "A note on phone numbers and forms" recently, BT seems to have delayed my line from the Phone Coop to the new house (waiting for BT engineers to fix some problem at the exchange).

Today I got a postcard saying "There's never been a better time to make savings with BT. [...] Come on, come back to BT's best ever offer and start saving." Where did they get my details from? I suspect it's the engineering request from the Phone Coop.

I think I'll try to do some damage to BT now and make this bad practice more expensive for them. I can't believe this isn't abuse of a dominant market position. BT owns the only telephone network here and is the largest retail telco, despite having IMO the worst service.

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Start of "Phones" section
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