For some reason when I put the headphones in the sound went all echoy and when I tried to fix it the tracks would randomly skip forwards, skip backwards and skip through tracks. I also noticed the headphones icon at the top included what looks to be a headset microphone.

Turns out I’m not the only one… users on Android Forums have been reporting the same issue. Very disappointing from a top-of-the-range Smartphone.

When I first got the phone it didn’t take more than a few days to notice that the connection was loose and it would shut off mid-charge etc. Not good. After leaving my charger in a hotel I bought a replacement from Argos. This was better but still has issues.

It was after this that I realised that the data cable for my work phone, a Nokia 5230, also had a micro-usb connector on the end. Guess what: it seems to fit perfectly!

So are HTC just cutting corners by supplying shit peripherals?

My Experience

I actually got one from Bodytech Collision Repair in Carrickfergus a few weeks ago, because they seem to be the only car body repair outfit open on a Saturday morning.  They came in at £666 + VAT which was £783.31 to you and me. They seemed very professional (nice modern office, ample parking, full-time receptionist) despite the out of date web site which still reports an operation in the Village area of Belfast (I think they said that branch just closed in March or April, though don’t quote me on that).

I would have probably just gone with that, since getting another estimate outside of office hours was so bloody difficult; I could tell people over the phone what it needed (a new tailgate) but they all wanted to see for themselves. Since I knew I’d have 2 weeks between jobs coming up I thought I’d wait though, and I’m glad I did (so far).

Yesterday I traipsed down to Lisburn to seek out Rankin Cooke, a garage where my dad had had his car fixed following a prang a few years ago.  Didn’t seem as “polished” – but maybe a bunch of guys in a garage can do as good/a better job and just don’t think they particuarly need a fancy office and receptionist. It’s just a little awkward to phone and have the person answering just say “Hello?” as if you’ve just called a stranger at home. Anyway, the important bit:  £693 (inc VAT) or £650  for cash. Excellent! Things were looking up and I left feeling I might be calling back soon to book her in. I just wanted at least one more estimate.

On to Bangor and TK Motors. Nice web site, professional setup (no receptionist but apparently dedicated estimators instead). Not so friendly as Rankin Cooke or Bodytech. The guy handed me an estimate for £871.57 and I left, trying to suppress a scornful chuckle. Sadly I missed Howell Accident Repair who operate practically round the corner from TK Motors so have no quote from them.

When I got home I came across a web site for Davey’s Accident Repair Centre on the Woodvale Road. The web site is a touch on the hideous side, but it has the important information there.   This morning I gave them a call (answered by a pleasant-sounding lady with a “Davey’s Accident Repair”) and tootled on up to get an estimate. After a quick look at the car and a quick phone call (to price the tailgate from Vauxhall, presumably, as seems to be standard procedure) he came up with £650. At the same price as Rankin Cooke, these guys had the separate office and a couple of desks including one staffed by the lady I’d spoken to on the phone.  It’d also be easier to get to on the bus if needs be (forgot to ask if that estimate included a courtesy car – I’m presuming Rankin Cooke’s didn’t).

So about ten seconds after leaving to think it over, I returned to book my wee motor in for that long-awaited new tailgate. Watch this space…

Advice to the Garages

If anyone from any of the above garages is reading this, please don’t take any offence to any of it.  I’m just trying to share a customer’s experience (that’s a customer who isn’t used to this type of thing) and maybe share a little insight. I did a bit of business management at university and I naturally notice things that could be improved on. It may sound presumptuous to phone up and say this but I’m guessing if you’ve found this story you’ve been googling yourself to find out what people think. So if you’re interested my advice would be:

Rankin Cooke: Just answer the phone with “Hello, Rankin Cooke” instead of “Hello?”. It would make a world of difference. Other than that, maybe an obvious entrance for Joe Public? With the big closed over iron garage door I felt like I wasn’t sure if I should be going in there. Oh and you were the only ones not to hand me some form of written estimate I could take away (TK Motors and Bodytech had printouts and Davey’s handed me a branded card, about 8″ by 4″, specifically for estimates and bookings). I’d like to see you guys (continue to?) do well so I’m not just bitching for the sake of it – wee things like that make a big difference to unsure customers (idiots?) like me. I’m not trying to run Rankin Cooke down, because I would have gone to them had I not found the Davey’s web site later that day

TK Motors: Too expensive. That’s all. Though if you can get away with charging prices like that good luck to you.

Bodytech: A bit on the dear side, but you can see what you’re paying for. Everything was very professional and the guy who gave me the estimate couldn’t have been more friendly.

On Websites

In my opinion all these guys could do with having a think about their web sites. I wouldn’t have even noticed Rankin Cooke had my dad not mentioned them. If they’d had a web site I would have, it’s as simple as that. Bodytech’s site is obviously dated but even inaccurate information is better than none (as long as that phone number informs callers of the new one) and I think it highlights them better in search results on Yell.com (which is where I started hunting).  TK Motors have the best site, it looks ok but it’s design makes it nasty to use.

Conclusion

Having said all that, my own order of preference would have been:

1. Davey’s (£650)
2. Rankin Cooke (£650)
3. Bodytech (£783.31)
4. TK Motors (£871.57)

so maybe I’ve just proved that all I’ve said is rubbish and price is the main factor (to a degree at least). I think I’d have paid an extra £30 or so for Bodytech over Davey’s and maybe £50 over Rankin Cooke but there’s just too much variance to justify it.  There’s just something reassuring about those wee extras that make the experience more comfortable to someone who is a novice at these things.

Regarding our comparison site, the redesign we’re working on at the moment will actually change the results table ranking, to being ranked by first year cost rather than introductory offer cost.

I’ve come across this before and complained (to no avail, but the vent was worth it) but today I discovered that Ofcom has an accreditation scheme for broadband sites. This sounded promising so I checked out the two sites that I was advised had received said accreditation: SimplifyDigital.co.uk and BroadbandChoices.co.uk.

Long-time readers (pretending there are any) will know that misleading advertising broadband is a major pet peeve of mine. Not misselling speeds, because there’s no reliable way an ISP can accurately predict what speed your line will take (if you don’t already have broadband).  This mis-selling is much worse; I’m talking about the companies who lie in their headline speeds by advertising broadband “from £4.99 a month” for the first three months, £14.99 thereafter, 12 month contract applies, not inclusive of compulsory phone-line rental.

Of course companies will continue to advertise lies like this as long as they get away with it, even the once-honest Plus net (who I do otherwise like) have now jumped on the bandwagon claiming they need to compete with scum like Tiscali and BT. Until someone takes them up on it they’ll continue lying and cheating customers with scant regard for concepts like honesty and integrity, but surely we can expect more of the broadband comparison sites who are, after all, fighting for a fair deal for the consumer, right?

Wrong. It seems the comparison sites get all caught up in the headline figures and thus actively encourage the misleading advertising that broadband companies seem so keen on.

Broadband Choices are easily the better of the two – their default display is sorted by “first year cost” (which would also include activation/connection charges), but they still display the monthly charge as the introductory offer figure.  In fact, they don’t display the actual monthly charge at all.

SimplifyDigital, on the other hand, is a complete joke. Not only do they default their display to sort by the “monthly” cost (of the first month) they don’t even give you the option to change that. Worse still, they don’t display a first-year-cost at all. It’s got me so annoyed that had I the time I’d give serious consideration to starting my own broadband comparison site that did a real comparison. They also seem to only list the big names (who presumably pay big commissions!), ignoring smaller providers like Plus Net (sorry to sound like a broken record, but they really are quite good).

An example query at Simplify Digital reveals 5 providers who meet “1 of 2″ of my very loose criteria. As it only sorts results by price, the cheapest should be at the top, however the ordering we actually get is:

1. Tiscali: £4.49 × 3 + £12.99 × 9
   Actual first-year price: £130.38
   (inc. line rental = £256.38)
2. BT: £7.95 × 3 + £15.99 × 9
   Actual first-year price: £167.76
   (inc. line rental = £293.76)
3. AOL: £9.99 × 3 + £19.99 × 9
   Actual first-year price: £209.88
   (inc. line rental = £335.88)
4. Orange: £10 × 3 + £20× 9
   Actual first-year price: £210
   (inc. line rental = £336)
5. TalkTalk: £15.49 (inc. line rental) × 12
   Actual first-year price: £185.88

It looks ok at first glance but you’ll quickly notice that if you look at the whole year instead of the first month things are not what they seem.  Include line rental and TalkTalk is the cheapest, not the most expensive. Even excluding line rental TalkTalk should leap ahead of AOL and Orange into 3rd.  What’s the point in a comparison site that only lets you rank results by price and doesn’t even do that right?  (By the way, I’d personally steer clear of all 5 of those companies, but that’s just my bad experience with Tiscali coupled with scare stories about the rest).

So there you have it: broadband comparison sites that instead of siding with consumers actually encourage introductory offers and misleading headline figures – practices designed to confuse consumers and make comparisons more difficult. Thanks guys.

Update: I’ve just had a response to an email I sent to SimplifyDigital.

Thank you very much for your feedback…

Regarding our comparison site, the redesign we’re working on at the moment will actually change the results table ranking, to being ranked by first year cost rather than introductory offer cost.

Yay!

To that end my tiny following just got tinier with the deletion of anyone following more than 10,000 people. That seems more than fair to me.

A quick google has revealed that I’m not alone in being pissed off by this. There is even a blog dedicated to “tracking abuse of the word ‘literally’” (apparently it happens even in works by respected authors, I mean come on!)

“It is bad enough to exaggerate but to affirm the truth of the exaggeration is intolerable.”

Ambrose Bierce, discussing the example sentence “His eloquence literally swept the audience from its feet.” in Write it right: A little blacklist of literary faults

I was reminded of this yesterday when one of those shitty “reality” TV shows was on. OK, it was shipwrecked (it was Sunday, my other half was watching it and I was immobile due to recovering from some gentle exercise). The latest bint rejected from the island was being carried off in a boat, supposedly on her way home. When she began to suspect she wasn’t being taken home but to another island she claimed that, if her suspicions were confirmed, she “would literally die”.

As appealing as that prospect sounded my fear that she was just the latest in a long line of people abusing the word literally was confirmed when after a full week she had failed to live up to her promise. Qu’elle surprise!

I love PHP. It’s everywhere. All my sites are written in it. My CMS is written in it. My blog engines, WordPress and b2evolution, are written in it. It’s free. It runs on any platform. Hosts all support it. With PHP 5 they’ve even done a lot of work on PHP4′s main downfall – lack of OOP support.

One thing really pisses me off though – it’s totally inconsistent.  Consider these two functions:

1. strstr — Find first occurrence of a string
2. in_array — Checks if a value exists in an array

Take a close look. See the signatures?

string strstr ( string $haystack , mixed $needle [, bool $before_needle ] )
bool in_array ( mixed $needle , array $haystack [, bool $strict ] )

In in_array the first parameter is what you’re looking for and the second is what you’re looking in (more or less consistent with preg_match).  In strstr (and its derivatives) this order is reversed. Who on Earth let that slip through? I’m yet to find a free text editor that will tell you which parameters a given function expects (Dreamweaver does a decent job but it’s bloody expensive for a text editor!) the way Visual Studio does for C#, which I use a lot in work.  Given that situation, you’d expect consistency in this sort of thing.  Apparently not so. Instead, every time I want to use one of these functions I have to do a quick Google to bring me to the PHP manual page to tell me which order the parameters come in.

Of course they can’t even fix that without breaking backwards compatibility either, so we’re probably stuck with it.  Bloody marvellous!

1. Review: Why the Netgear WG311 v3 Sucks (72)
   Slightly dodgy network card that Netgear don’t seem that fussed about fixing. Bad on XP, it got worse on Vista (see number 4).
   
2. Playing iPod Video on Your TV (45)
   Seems to be a lot of people looking for instructions for the iPod Classic. Here’s a tip: sell it.
3. Server application unavailable: installing IIS on .NET 2.0 (44)
   Seems to be a common problem. Sadly Microsoft’s error message is about as relevant as ever.
   
4. Installing Vista (AKA More Netgear WG311 Misery) (31)
   Even more messed up. Thank goodness for Linksys!
   
5. Thunderbird/Outlook/Google Calendar Integration (25)
   How to integrate your Thunderbird calendar at home with your Outlook in work, via Google Calendar.
   
6. Orange Answerphone (Voicemail) Number for PAYG (23)
   Such a simple problem. Who knew it would be so hard to find?
   
7. Stop Monitor.exe Hogging CPU (20)
   Why can’t people just give you a standard installation instead of trying to do everything for you? Help sounds good, until their useful tools start killing your PC.
   
8. How to run IIS Web Server in Windows XP Home (20)
   Microsoft’s official line is it can’t be done, but it’s not that tricky.
   
9. Making Firefox Scroll With Syanptics TouchPad (19)
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10. NAS or Home Server (17)
    I deliberate over whether I can justify spending the extra to build or buy a home server before eventually deciding that a Linkstation Live will meet my needs for less than half the price.
    

Feel free to make any enquiries through this blog or give me a call (numbers on the LoadzaCars page).

I should explain at this point that we had 2 bins (see below). When I asked the figure what they were doing faint voice muttered something in an English accent about him having left it out some weeks back and my having “moved it” to beside my door (as you do). I explained that we’d had it for months and that the council had delivered us an extra one. He didn’t exactly seem to dispute this but was somehow maintaining it was his and that we’d taken his; something to do with him ordering one from the council and that I could check with his (and my, as it turns out) landlord. Being 2am I told him I closed the door with an “Ah, whatever man” and got back to work. Only I didn’t, as you can now tell by virtue of the fact that I’m writing about it here!

I sat fuming, fruitlessly trying to get some more work done, but what exactly am I that annoyed about? We still have a bin, it was a spare. He all but accused me of stealing, but he doesn’t even know me so it was hardly personal. Maybe it’s because I backed down too easily when I got confused by his apparent stupidity. Maybe it’s been pent up from all the times other folk have been dumping their shite in my bin (again, no big deal since we never filled it). It was nice having a second bin in case we forgot to leave ours out one week, but it wasn’t really necessary by any stretch of the imagination. Maybe it was the sheer spinelessness of waiting until 2 in the morning. None of those things seem to justify just how pissed off I was (am?) though.

I think it’s just part of the nerd psychee. Nobody wants to feel like a pushover, least of all a nerd who knows he’s often too lazy and/or apathetic to make a fuss. Got a better analysis? I’m all ears…

Let me explain about the second bin. When ours was stolen last year after being left out I phoned the council and asked for a new one, which they delivered the following Saturday morning. However, by this stage I had spotted my own bin outside a house 6 or 7 doors down the road and recovered it. I explained this to the men delivering the new one basically just said we may as well take it since they were here now. So we did.