I’ve had a month of getting to know my new phone. For the most part I’m happy with the switch. For general usage, the LG u8110 handset is easy to use and the network seems adequate in terms of coverage and reliability. However, there are some annoying problems that crop up from time to time.
First off, contrary to what I said earlier, you can browse the web on the phone, but there is a bug in the firmware that means that it only ever uses the first configured access point regardless of which one you tell it to use. The way it’s supposed to work is that you have two APs: one that connects exclusively to the “3 services” network and another that connects to the internet and you then switch between them depending on whether you want to access 3’s mostly crap content for little or no charge, or useful content on the internet at prohibitive data rates. The firmware bug means that you have to reconfigure the pre-configured AP. This is a nuisance, but I can live with it given that I rarely want to browse either the internet, or 3’s services from my mobile.
Phone issues
- As I’ve said before, the PC-based phone management software is appallingly bad. It is very poorly designed and is unreliable to the point of being unusable. Once you work out how to successfully connect to the phone, it’s no guarantee that you will be able to transfer files. Sometimes it will work, sometimes it won’t. Even when it is working, for some bizarre reason you can’t just drag and drop files from the phone to the PC. You have to play or view media files in the Phone Manager before you can upload them to the PC.
- The ringtones that come with the phone are all atrocious. Presumably this is done deliberately to encourage people to pay for downloadable ringtones from the network operators.
- While you can change your ringtone to anything you want, message tones are strictly limited the factory set choices.
Network issues
- There are some serious roaming issues. When in Daylesford a couple of weeks back, I didn’t receive any calls or messages even though I had pretty good coverage most of the time. I wasn’t expecting any, so I didn’t think anything of it … until I got back into Melbourne and received a barrage of SMSs and voicemail notifications, one of which had been backed up for 27 hours!
- This notion of having different access points for 3 services and the internet is just lame.
- Speaking of lame, the 3 content is rubbish.
The roaming issue is quite serious and it wasn’t a simple case of lack of coverage. I periodically checked the signal strength indicator and except for a few locations I had good coverage in and around Daylesford. It seems that 3 has serious problems when you are roaming outside the 3 video coverage zone.
My final beef is with the phone management software. I’ve already mentioned that it is poorly designed and cantankerous. Now, for some no readily apparent reason it has stopped working on my laptop. The only way I can transfer files to and from my phone is to use my computer at work.
