Protap: negotiate a little bit on the first call so they can give you something OK. You get 7 days to cancel, so a few days later, call up and say you know what, I'm not interested after all. That sometimes unlocks the best retention deals.

isanbard wrote:

New iphone is a good few months away yet - Autumn sometime?  My O2 contract is all but expired too on the trusty 4 and they're starting to wind up the pestering calls. I've no real reason to re-sign a bizarre holding contract thanks, I'll just drop onto a rolling month thing and see who gives the best deal.  All this talk of free HTCs and whatnot does sound like a handy cash plan if I could be arsed though. Nice bonus Funk.

I bounced down to one of the O2 rolling simplicity things, but added a data pack on. 600 minutes, unlimited texts, 1 gb data for £20 a month. Only stayed with O2 to keep my preferential upgrade to a 5 when they eventually come out.

Oi, Workid.  I've just dumped about 8GB of music onto the 16GB (11GB available) internal memory, so am thinking of getting one of them new fangled mini-SD cards to add storageness.  If I do that and shove more music onto it will the phone put the two folders together as far as browsing by album/artist is concerned?

More annoying questions sorry.

I really like the look and feel of the Lumia 800 (and the price) but I only have a iMac G5 which whilst slow still works fine. Would I be able to sync the Lumia with my Mac or is this not supported?

Yeah it's getting on a bit now, but moneys too tight to mention right now and with a baby on the way a new computer is way down on the priority list.

I'm guessing this will be the case with any new smartphone and syncing it, when I got my iPhone 4 I had to upgrade to Leopard just to be able to sync the phone and get it started up.

My wife has a work laptop so maybe I could borrow that, would the Lumia appear as a drive and for dragging and dropping on my mac?

No worries at all, it's not bad news but good to be forewarned. Thank you for the help you've been able to give me. 

I know lots of people who've got a PC I could borrow to sync and transfer my media but it does seem a bit of a hassle to do this every time I want to update my phone.

I think the best course of action is to, stick with my iPhone 4 and just change my contract to a Tesco or Giff Gaff sim just to drop my monthly spend. Only downside with this is that Orange charge £20 to unlock a phone which I think is a bit cheeky to be honest.

Sounds like that could be worth doing, out of interest which handset did you go for?

Ah cool cheers I'm not sure I'd get such a cracking deal on Orange, 3 always seem to offer the best deals but the last time I tried 3 I couldn't get a signal at home (in deepest darkest Gloucestershire) and had a hell of a job for them to take the phone back.

I'm certainly with you there Mod on the dislike of handsets getting bigger, I think it's pretty unnecessary and handsets like the iPhone 4 and Lumia are currently big enough. There was a Lumia 900 in the shop when I had a brief browse yesterday and that has jumped up in size from the 800.

I'd say I prefer the design of the Lumia 800 to the iPhone but that may be because the iPhone 4 is so ubiquitous that the looks which I adored at first have become dull.

How are you getting on with it anyway?
I don't really like the stock music player but haven't tried anything else as yet.

That's my only gripe really.

I quite like the 3 customer service these days, especially their supreme earnestness. No doubt they've been encouraged to improve over the years. 

I complained about lack of coverage in my flat, they told me exactly what was going on, sent me a text to tell me it was fixed, then gave me a follow-up call to check it was ok whilst chucking me a tenner to make up for barely 24hours of inconvenience. 

GiffGaff has the cheapest deals, but O2 traffic is possibly prioritised (according to my O2 ex-colleagues) and when it goes down, it goes down hard...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/19/giffgaff_outage/

Has anybody had first hand experience of Onkyo? I'm thinking of getting the NR515 to replace my Sony...

Oh and while I'm at it the wireless appears to be fucked on my BT Homehub, everything seems slow on wi-fi but Ethernet is normal. I heard that there is a Cisco router that's meant to be good but I know fuck all about what makes a router good or bad?

They appear to be pushing the new one and want money for it, I have thought about going for the 12 month sign up angle to get it for free but then figured if there is a difference between the quality of routers I'd just buy the Cisco E4200 as it gets good reviews. Like I said though I don't really know anything about routers...

I've had this Sony for years (STR-DB940) and other than one little blip it has been absolutely rock solid but the lack of HDMI is a bit of a concern now as I have filled all my HDMI's on my TV so I figured a way around it would be to change amp.

What you have heard is worrying though and even if I added a 5-year warranty to it (refundable if not used) I still would expect longer than 5 years from it, I'll have to look into it further.

Have had a Onkyo SR607  that I got nice and cheap from a 'B stock' listing off a decent Hifi shop on Ebay. 

Worked fine for about 6 months or so and was fairly faultless in that time. Then it stopped passing a component video signal (the Wii audio was ok but no picture if plugged into it for example) which meant it didn't have an onscreen display anymore. It was a fairly common issue with some captors blowing or something - not a tricky fix if you clan solder but not for me and certainly not in the 12 month warranty.
I shipped it off to the service agents and inevitably the post office/dhl/whoever I had to use lost it before it got there and I had to have a fun conversation with them about finding a now out year or so of date model to replace it. This all got quite frisky until they eventually dusted one off from a shelf and sent it over with a new 12 month warranty. So far this one has been fine and I was pretty impressed (after all the irritations and whatnot) given it was released in 2009. 

tl;dr In my experience they sound great but can be a bit flakey (cheaper 'b stock' warning perhaps??). They do generally seem to review pretty well though and going back to stereo is akin to cycling all the way back to black and white. 5.1 is essential imho.