Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Great day, excitment, ... cell phone company

After asking in a couple of Claro offices downtown I had to call customer support to find out where I could get a hold of an 8310. It happened to be available in the office nearest home so I headed towards the store first time on Saturday morning. After making me wait for 30-40 minutes a sales clerk did her stuff (or so I thought at the moment) and off I went with my new phone. It took the network about 15 minutes to allow my new device to connect. At that point I started playing with my new toy. As a phone it is great, the best I ever had I would say. It is about 450 US dollars including a carrier discount. I also had to subscribe to the mandatory flat EDGE data service for 16 dollars per month. I have to mention the phone interface is great, the options are countless (speakerphone, smart dialing - i.e: really smart like searching everywhere in your addressbook for the few letters( or numbers) you are typing- , speaker is loud and clear, signal y typically stronger than in my previous Samsung D600, speaker independent voice dialing is awesome too, and many more).
So far so good. Then I tried the Maps application, which takes a significant amount of time to get a fix from the satellites. The funny thing was when It did it said "You are here" with a pin on a non-existent map ..., at that point I started to realize that the data network was unavailable. I checked the signal an I had 4 bars and a big EDGE sign on the top right corner of the screen ... How come ? (short answer: The company forgot to provision something on the network.)

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