It’s been quite a week.

I’ve been using O2 broadband for a good few years now and have had no issues. Only recently I also moved my home phone to them as well and, so, when buying a new mobile phone contract it was O2 I went to (especially as they take £5 off your broadband monthly bill if you do).

So, moving home… I did the right thing. About a week and a half before moving I contacted them. I gave them the date of the 24^th of August. They explained that a BT engineer visit is arranged and usually takes up to 10 working days. The first opportunity they could find was the 8^th September. Until then I’d be without broadband. However, after the move I released that I didn’t know if this included the phone – was that swapped over quicker? I decided to call them. It was a good job I did.

It would appear that the person I originally spoke to put the 2 aforementioned dates in his notes but then got confused when actually booking the engineer – he put my move date down as the 8^th September. That meant that an engineer would be a further 10 working days after that. Nearly a month without a land line and broadband? I was fuming.

It’s usually at this point that a company can recover a situation by doing whatever they can to help the customer, showing a concern for the mistake that they’ve made. Sadly, this didn’t happen. I was told nothing could be done and that was it. Silence. I spoke to a supervisor. It was the same thing – an explanation that nothing could be done and lots of silence when I insisted that something, anything, had to be done.

I suggested that they add some free minutes to my phone contract but they told me that they were a difference part of the company to the mobile division and couldn’t do this. What they did suggest, in the end, was that I travel to an O2 shop and purchase a dongle. They paid, to my card, £40 to buy this and a £10 top-up. That would give me 1GB of data.

My nearest town doesn’t have an O2 shop so I’d have to travel out of my way to get it… for 1GB (which wouldn’t last long at all). I wasn’t impressed.

Thankfully, I have a bit more intelligence than they did and I’m using my £40 to buy data top-ups for my phone. The Galaxy S2 can act as a wireless hotspot so I’m switching that on and then, unlike if I had a dongle, any wifi device in the house can connect to it. With £40 now to spend I can get through 4GB – a lot better!

As for phone calls… I’m still stuck with an hour of free minutes during the month. Unsurprisingly, I’ve sent a formal complain to O2 and I await their response.

To add insult to injury I received a text from O2 yesterday to state that my latest mobile phone bill was unpaid. I recently moved banks and although they’d have been sent details of my account, they appear to have not actioned it – I ended up having to set up the direct debit back up again over the phone. I then had to pay my outstanding bill, otherwise face being “cut off” within days. Unfortunately, their system wouldn’t accept payment from any of my cards – I was told it was because I’d used the wrong address, but I hadn’t (and have used the same cards successfully since). I was told to try again after 24 hours and just have – it failed on my debit card but eventually accepted my credit card. Does anything work?

Update (19/09/2011):

A week after the initial problem I got a phone call from James from their Complaints Review Service. He apologised profusely and arranged for a connection date of the 14th September (yesterday).

Whilst talking to him again last week he had something else to admit though. Because of the date mix-up our phone number, which we’d asked to have transferred, had been released. As O2 is new to the home phone market they don’t yet have a method in place yet to request phone numbers from BT so had, essentially, lost it. Again, I was told there was nothing they could do about it.

Really not impressed I mentioned this on Facebook and a friend sent me details of a European directive that had been taken up by OFCOM in the UK which basically meant that companies had to provide “portability” of phone numbers. I spoke to OFCOM and they said that this didn’t require them to transfer my number, only to be able to give me the option (essentially, it’s useless legislation). They did, though, tell me that O2 only needed to apply to BT Wholesale to get my number back as it wasn’t usually re-used for at least a month. Speaking to James, however, he denied it was this simple.

At this point I should break away from the story and discuss James from O2. Or rather getting in touch with James from O2. He never gave me a last name, reference or, indeed, a direct number. Instead I had the number of a switchboard that constantly denied his existance. I was told, over a number of phone calls, that they had “only one James and he’s never spoken to you” or “sorry nobody called James works here”. One afternoon, I despaired when I was told, once again, that the James I was after didn’t work there. I was then told I “shouldn’t be rude”. Shouldn’t be rude? I think I had a right at this point.

Anyway, back to the story…

I was told that a BT engineer would attend yesterday and would need to be at home between 1 and 6pm. Normally an engineer wasn’t needed but in this case O2 wanted to make sure everything was working so he’d be there to check everything out.

He turned up around 4pm and immediately asked where I wanted it. Wanted what? “The phone socket”. But I don’t need a phone socket, just a line transferring. Apparently that isn’t what he was told. None-the-less, he would sort out the transfer and he and his mate disappeared for about an hour before returning. My phone was transferred and tested fine. My broadband, however, wasn’t working. They didn’t bother looking at that – they went as soon as they knew the phone worked. So much for them being there to ensure everything worked.

On my modem my broadband light was flashing (it should be solid) and the internet light was off completely. By this time it was nearly 5pm so I rang James. Of course, it wasn’t easy as they, again, denied his existence. I did get through and I was told that my internet access just needed turning on which James did there and then. However, when they know I was being connected why hadn’t they sorted this? Or, at least, if I didn’t need to call why hadn’t they told me this?

So, at this stage my home phone and broadband is on. My internet connection is now a cool 9MB, compared to the barely 2MB I got at the old house. These speeds were predicted by BT via their website checker sometime ago.

I’d like to say this was the end of the story because it isn’t – I’ve had to ring O2 this morning to find out why my caller display wasn’t working. I pay extra for this service from O2 (they charge extra for all the “little extras” that you often get free to keep the base price down – it’s a good move, so I don’t have an issue with paying for this additionally). It turned out that they needed to transfer the service from the old number to the new one. Again, when they knew this was happening, why didn’t they do this? And, to add insult to injury, it will take up to 4 working days before it starts.

I make one final call to James who seems unconcerned about the fact that they didn’t set up the caller display. What he does do though is check out the quality of my broadband line – based on this he halved the noise tolerance on my line, boosting my internet speed to 12MB.

My compensation for all this… free broadband for the year. I wasn’t overwhelmed but, equally, wasn’t disappointed enough to complain further. Hopefully, I won’t have to speak to O2 again over the next year.

Released November last year, the LiveView is an iPod Shuffle size “gadget” from Sony Ericsson that reports information from your Android phone via Bluetooth.

It’s not had a smooth ride either – early software was buggy, battery life was poor, people had problems with one of the provided clips and reviews were generally negative. It’s now 9 months later, the software has been updated and the price has dropped. Is it now worth a look?

Can you use it?

Although made by Sony Ericsson, it does work on other phones as well – a  full list of compatible phone is listed on their site. As a general rule of thumb, just as long as you have Android 2.0 and  Bluetooth 2.1 or above, then you should be fine.

What’s in the box?

In the box you get the LiveView, 2 clips (more on that in a minute), a strap, a power cable (which plugs into the Micro USB port) and an instruction booklet.

The clips connect to the underside of the LiveView and you can either have a belt clip version or one that you can connect the strap to and convert it to a watch. However, connecting the strap is fiddly as it comes with 2 thin telescopic pins that must be threaded through the strap and pushed into the phone clip. I found the edge of a flat-bladed screwdriver was useful in pushing the pins down before snapping them into place. Once done, however, that’s it – why didn’t Sony package the strap already connected and save consumers this hassle?

I mentioned before that people had problems with one of the clips – this was the watch one and, apparently, many people had issues with it coming away from the LiveView when in use. However, there were then reports that a change was made to the design. If this is the case then it did resolve the issue because I’ve had no such problems.

What does it look like?

The device itself is square, black and is lacking any kind of branding what-so-ever (unless you look on the back). There are two buttons on the top and a micro USB port on the bottom. One of the buttons also has an LED built into it to indicate current status.

The screen is OLED – it’s not touch-screen but you scroll around by lightly pushing the edges of the screen. The one downside of the otherwise good screen is that the front is cheap glossy plastic and will very easily scratch in use.

The provided strap is of a canvas style material and is held with Velcro. Not very elegant but it works. Because it uses the standard “pin” method of being held in place, I suspect most watch straps would work so a replacement should be easy to come by.

Size wise, it’s 35mm square and 11mm deep. The depth is the real issue, particularly when used as a watch – it’s rather deep. I’d have preferred a wider device which had less depth. The weight is 15 grams.

I’d love to say that depth is due to a removable back, but it isn’t. As far as I can tell the battery is non-replaceable.

One further issue is that when used as a watch the strap gets in the way of the USB port so you have to remove the LiveView from the clip to charge it. Whatever the earlier issues were, though, I found the watch stayed in the clip without a problem.

Getting Started

The first you need to do is fully charge the LiveView using the supplied USB cable (or any other micro USB cable). Next, pair the device with your phone – I found this easy to achieve.

The next thing I’d recommend doing is updating the firmware on it. This isn’t documented, but you can download the Software Updater software from the Sony Ericsson website. Install it and follow the on-screen instructions. However, you’ll need a cable to connect the LiveView to your computer via USB (which SE didn’t include in the box).

Once you have the latest Firmware you need to head to the Android Market Place and download LiveWare manager and the LiveView Application. Confusingly, the first allows you to download any plugins available for the LiveWare, the second then lets you configure them and the LiveWare itself. That’s right – plugins. You can install special plugins to add further capability to the phone.

For some reason it doesn’t store the date and time when not connected to your phone so this is lost when they’re no longer paired – an odd way to do it. Press the power button and within a matter of seconds it will connect to your phone and, hopefully, the date and time will then appear. Press the second button to switch to the various events that can be reported.

What does it do?

Straight out of the box, the LiveView can do the following…

• Music player control. Press the right button for a couple of seconds and the display will show a media control – your currently playing track on your phone is shown and you can use the 4-way screen control to move tracks, pause, etc. This is designed to work with the stock Android media player and is not guaranteed to work with others. However, it works fine with the player on my Samsung Galaxy S2.
• Incoming calls. Shows the  phone number (and name, if available)) for incoming calls and you can mute the ringer too. Missed calls can also be viewed.
• Text Messages. Shows any text messages that have been received.
• Calendar Reminders. Not a calendar viewer, but simply shows any reminders.
• Social Updates. Shows updates from Facebook and Twitter. This isn’t live “wall” information, but rather notifications. The functionality is limited but still remains useful.
• Find my phone. Selecting this cause the phone to ring at full volume – useful for when you’ve mislaid the phone (however, it still has to be in Bluetooth range, which is only up to about 10 metres).

When any kind of event occurs then the LiveView vibrates. However, it’s so subtle that many people think the function doesn’t work – it does, but may be easily missed.

So, some reasonable functionality, but many are probably more limited than you’d have expected.

A number of plugins are available (some free, some not) to expand this capability but I’ve found few to be of use. The one I really wanted was Gmail but the only plugin to provide this doesn’t work (and everyone else appears to be having the same issue as well). Other useful plugins are “Mode” (allows you to modify your various volume controls) and  “Calendar” (view your calendar and any entries). Sadly the Alarm Clock plugin didn’t work for me either.

Battery Life

Battery life has been a real issue for many users, with many stating that it only lasts a day. Considering the fact it’s running an OLED screen and bluetooth in such a small device it’s probably not surprising. I’ve had the LiveView now for about 4 weeks and have only recharged it twice.

Although I wear it regularly, I have few alerts to look at so the screen is rarely on. And I suspect it’s the screen that limits the battery life rather than the connectivity.

If you assume you will need to charge it each night then you’re not going to be disappointed. But there’s a good chance you will be pleased.

Conclusion

It’s a great concept at a very good price. Sadly, it’s let down in the end by its lack of useful (or working) plugins, rather than the early teething problems. It’s also a bit clunky to navigate.

If Sony Ericsson were to release a replacement, here are my top wishes…

• Expand the functionality of the built in functions
• Improve the screen – a flat glass screen would be best
• Reduce the depth
• Put the USB port on the side
• Ensure a number of good quality, working plugins are available – get developers interested in the product!

Lastly, a watch that displayed the time permanently would be good – a blank watch that needs a button press to see the time is like returning to an early 70′s digital watch. A thin LCD substrate over the top of the OLED screen would allow a traditional digital watch output when the LiveView has a blank display.

Summary of Sony Ericsson LiveView

Good price, good idea, good screen but let by down by the design (bulky, cheap plastic) and the lack of software  expansion. However, it’s good to see that Sony Ericsson ironed out a lot of the initial problems. Get it from Amazon for £42.99

Reviewed by David Artiss on 19th August 2011.

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Launched only in 2008, Groupon has become big, quickly. The idea of it is that they have a deal each day and, if enough people sign up for it, the deal is given. It works much like the ill-fated “dot com” startup LetsBuyIt.com.

Starting in the US, it spread quickly to other countries. Google offered $5.3 billion for it last year but were turned down. Instead, Google are launching their own equivalent, “Google Offers”, as is Facebook. Indeed, there are 500 similar sites already offering a similar offer. However, what Groupon has that the others don’t is the number of customers and the number of companies queueing up to use them.

So, using Groupon is simple – sign up, specify your nearest city and they’ll email you each day with their current offer (or, alternatively, visit their website – there’s no requirement to receive emails from them). If you decide to accept it, and enough other people do, you have your deal. Most of these offers are usually around dining out and health & beauty products and services, but you’ll usually save over 50% if not a lot more.

When you have signed up, and assuming you like their service, if you recommend a product to a  friend (and they buy the product) you’ll receive £6 credit to your account!

At the very least, it’s worth a try – you really do have nothing to lose!