I just bought an HTC Desire from Orange, and while it's an awesome phone, the random Orange branding that came with it was pretty irritating - naff-looking browser icon, non-removable demos for crappy games, an 'Orange Market' alongside the Android Market, no GTalk, etc. I hadn't planned to muck around with alternate ROMs or anything, but I had to ( Read more... )

For my own benefit, and the benefit of anyone Googling for this...

Go into Phone Settings -> Connectivity -> USB connection mode, and choose Data Service

Plug the phone into your computer using the USB cable (presumably Bluetooth will work as well, but USB should be a lot more reliable)

Download the LG Mobile Support Tool. This tool is primarily ( Read more... )

After about a month or two, the Viewty is starting to annoy me a bit. I've gained a greater appreciation for SonyEricsson's software design - the Viewty's software seems to be put together from several different licensed apps, with only cursory effort put towards making things consistent ( Read more... )

Bought myself a new phone today: an LG KU990 'Viewty' - silly name, but shiny shiny phone. It's no iPhone, but it was only £200 on pay as you go, and it's got a much better camera (5MP, flash, auto-focus, image stabilisation, video capture ( Read more... )

My mum has a new phone. She went from an ancient Phillips one with a two-line dot matrix display to a SonyEricsson W300i - just a little bit of a change. I think she nearly squee'd when she discovered that not only did it have a radio, but the phone would also mute the radio and switch to handsfree when a call was received and un-mute it when it ( Read more... )

Well, inspired by call_waiting and sixteen_bit, I phoned O2 and told them I wanted to cancel my account. After a bit of chat about PAC codes and suchlike, the customer services guy put me through to Account Retentions, who ummed and ahhed and came up with a new plan: £15 per month, 50 minutes, 25 texts, 200kb GPRS, plus a new handset. Then they offered me £75 credit ( Read more... )

I've just realised that I've been billed for £7.99 a month for the last ten months or so, for phone insurance. Again with Phones4U promising to call me to check whether I wanted to continue the policy and not actually doing so. That's a hundred quid down the drain - and that's on top of the money I lost due to the whole debacle with expired rebates ( Read more... )

Well, I finally got around to flashing the firmware in my phone (a K750). The list of firmware changes on esato lists Bluetooth stability increases, higher volumes with less noise, better reception, less camera latency and various other fixes. Not exactly the most pain-free process - the update service never actually completed the flash write, just ( Read more... )

Well, I just checked my bank account, and I have another £44 bill from O2 in today. That's a month and a half after I called them and they happily agreed to reduce me to a £16 contract, and four months after I should have had a phone call to arrange my reduction to that contract, according to Phones4U ( Read more... )

So, it turns out that while my phone is quite good at being a camera, an MP3 player, a text reader and various other uses - it's not actually very good at being a phone. I was in a rather important phone call when I heard a 'beepbeepboop' chime in my ear, the call cut off, and the phone's screen went white. It had locked up solid - I had to remove ( Read more... )