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There is a sick practice in marketing in telecoms that is much worse than the misleading speeds issue Ofcom and the ASA have recently been looking at. Let’s face it, anyone who knows what a Megabit actually means is likely to realise the quoted “up to” speed means very little in real terms. No, a much bigger issue with the broadband industry is misleading price claims, which have been a pet peeve of mine for some months now. BT are not the only ones guilty of this, but from what I’ve seen they are the worst offenders - employing similar tactics for other products, like their mobile plan.

Without the slightest hint of shame, BT advertise their unlimited option 3 broadband service is advertised on their site, on a page comparing their three plans, as “From only £18.99 a month”. Normally you expect a catch when you see the words “from only” preceding a price, and that’s fine if you’re adding extras on top of a basic plan, but here, the advertised price is essentially a headline-grabbing lie. Contrast with Virgin Media, who advertise their headline introductory price first, but immediately followed by their regular price (and applicable conditions) given virtually equal prominence.

You see, when you click on “more about option 3″ (the ads for other plans or ‘options’ all contain similar lies) you’re taken to a page explaining that it’s really £18.99 for just 6 months of an 18 month contract, then £24.99. Basically, I don’t see why BT (and others) should be allowed to get away with advertising a price of £18.99 for a service that actually costs £22.99 a month over the minimum term and obviously more if, as BT would like, you stay on the plan at the full price once that term has ended. Worse yet, the “order now” link takes you directly to the Option 3 sign-up page without the slightest hint that you’ll be paying over 20% more than you they told you. I wonder would they actually let you complete the registration without informing you?! (I got as far as them asking me for my MAC number).

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I love FireFox, both as a web browser and as a web designer. I love it because it works, I love it for adhering (much better than IE ever will anyway) to web standards and I love it for the handy plugins that you can get.

I hate it though, for thrashing my CPU to 99% whenever I load some pages with flash animations in them. UnitedWebHosting which, as of this date, hosts this site (though probably not for long) is one that’ll do it. Today, I went to ZDnet UK only for a couple of Intel ads to do the same.

It seems like a bit of a joke that a company the size of Adobe (the makers of Flash: they write the plugin, not Mozilla) haven’t managed to resolve this, fairly major, bug. I’m sure they know about it, I mean different people seem to have been talking about since at least January last year.

Obviously while FireFox is hogging 99% of your CPU there’s only 1% to share among the rest of the programs you have running, so Outlook and the rest didn’t have much of a hope of doing anything at all until I killed the FireFox process in task manager. As this wasn’t the first time this had happened, I decided to go hunting for a solution - which brings me to FlashBlock (hat-tip to The Idiot).

FlashBlock uses JavaScript to replace flash animations in web pages with placeholders (an empty square with a flash logo in the middle). Don’t worry though, clicking this will run the flash animation if you really want to see something (e.g. if you visit YouTube or another site where the primary content is encoded in Flash files). In fact you can even specify a ‘white-list’ of sites in which flash content will run automatically.

The good news is that Nokia’s new “N95i”, or Nokia N95 8GB as it looks like being officially dubbed, is going to see a UK release this side of Christmas. The bad news is that it seems to be a Vodafone exclusive. This is not good news for anyone that was hoping to get a good deal on it as, in my experience anyway, Vodafone seem to be much more expensive than O2 and Orange in terms of tariff deals (although to be fair they’re all getting more expensive for handset prices).

What’s the big deal with the new N95 8GB anyway? Well, there are a few tweaks to the N95 formula: for a start I’ve wanted a phone equipped with WiFi for a good while now, but while the N95 met this criterion it apparently ate batteries, so the new 8GB version Nokia are releasing has a bigger battery as well as an even bigger 2.8″ screen (very useful when using the wireless to browse the internet) and has 8GB of internal flash memory instead of an expansion slot. I really badly wanted an N95 but I’ve been hanging off until this comes out, though I may be hoping for too much for Vodafone to have it available on a £30/month tariff before Christmas (the busiest time of the year for mobile phone sales).

Ah well, maybe I can get one in the January sales?

For more info on the N95 8GB see the Nokia or “tweaks” links in the post or see this Dialaphone blog post.