How Play.com treated me

On the 13th July I ordered 2 product, both of which were in stock. On the 19th July I realised that I hadn’t heard anything further about these orders so looked them up on the companies website. Both were showing as “packing” – the Help text indicates that this status usually occurs for up to 24 hours. Next day, sure enough, I received a “despatched” email but only for one item. The other was still “packing”. Next day I sent them an email but, still finding it as “packing” on the website on the 22nd I rang them.

Play appear to use an “off shore” help desk – the line is quiet and they appear to work from a basic script. I told them the issue and they told me that as it was being packed it would take 24 hours. I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt – maybe they were doing something to ensure it got despatched.

On Saturday 23rd I received a reply to my email..

Your order is currently being packed as of 23/07/2011, and should be dispatched shortly.

The status was still “packing” but they’d changed the date on the order to show that this was the status as of the 23rd. When I rang on the Monday (yes, it was still “packing”) I was told it only had that status since Saturday – I corrected them firmly, stating that they’d simply updated the date but in fact it had been packing since the previous week. Again I was told it would be despatched within 24 hours, and they’d left a note for the despatch department to chase it up.

On Tuesday it was still, yes, “packing”. I rang them. They told me it would be 24 hours. I saw red. My voice rose and I angrily asked to speak to a manager. After 10 minutes of being on hold I needed to leave for work so ended up hanging up. They made no attempt to contact me in the meantime – I rang them myself  an hour later. Again, I was told it would be 24 hours. This time I calmly asked to speak to a manager. They put me through to a supervisor who told me she would chase it up herself and ensure something happens with the next 24 hours.

Whilst waiting I directed Tweets at Play.com via their Twitter account – the first one to express that I’m unhappy with their customer service, the other to ask if there’s anyone in the UK I can speak to with regard to my issue. The first was ignored, the second one resulted in them directing me to their standard customer services email. When I replied to ask what I did when that didn’t work they took my order ID and investigate it.

And I got a result. After 2 weeks.

The product is….. out of stock. The item on the Play website also now shows it as taking 1-2 weeks to deliver. So they offered a refund, which I’ve accepted, with apologies. I’ve now ordered the same item from Amazon.

How Play.com treated a friend

Maybe this is just a one-off? Or maybe not.

A friend of mine ordered a Christmas present last year from Play. However, when it turned up it was a different product – similar but not what he ordered. He rang their Helpdesk to arrange to send it back. However, he was told that they didn’t have stock of the product they ordered, hence why they’d sent something similar.

So, he wanted his money back. No problem. Would he get his postage back? Yes. Great. He sent the product back and was refunded – but not for the postage. He rang their Help Desk to be told they wanted him to email a copy of his receipt (even though the postage price would have been printed on his returned parcel). He did this but the money didn’t turn up. After ringing them 3 times about this and getting nowhere he gave up, had his Play.com account deleted (you can’t do this via the website) and never shopped there again. He told them he was going to do this on the third phone call but nobody seemed to care – they happily cancelled his account.

Why does this matter?

I know these aren’t one-off’s – a couple of years ago the website Bitter Wallet stated that Play.com missed out on a place in their Worst Company in Britain contest by a single vote

Even if my issue this time is a one-off it doesn’t matter – they’ve had multiple opportunities to resolve this to my satisfaction (which is hardly set to a high bar – send me my product!) and have failed at every opportunity. That’s not a mistake, it’s blind incompetence – they have treated a good customer so poorly and there really was no need for it. After waiting 2 weeks, I am now forced to order the product elsewhere and wait longer to finally get it.

What’s failing from Play.com here is 2 fold..

1. No one is realising that they are repeating the same message. If they did they’d realise something was wrong. Repeating the same, incorrect message leads to an unhappy customer.
2. They appear to have no way to escalate an issue – all they can is repeat instructions from the website. If it deviates from this, they’re stuck.

I contacted Play’s PR company informing them of this post and giving them an opportunity to respond. I have yet to receive a response from them.

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It was an HP Mini 210 in “Sonoma Red”. The dark red paintwork is not only on the lid, but extends to underneath as well – and very nice it looks too.

It runs Windows 7 Starter (which I hadn’t tried before – indeed, I’ve not tried Windows 7 on a Netbook at all) and has an N450 Atom processor (1.67Ghz) with 1GB memory and a 250GB hard drive.

The keyboard is a “scrabble tile” style, again something I’ve not tried before and, because of the width of the HP, is a good size. It was nice to use, unlike the touchpad which many other reviews have commented on. Rather than have separate buttons, the HP trackpad has it so that you click down the pad itself in the corners. It doesn’t work very well, particularly when I was trying to right click. Maybe playing with the trackpad settings would have helped, but I didn’t get an opportunity to try.

It’s a pretty standard 10.1″ 1024×600 resolution screen, but thanks to the “LED HP BrightView” it is extremely bright – even on mains I had the brightness turned down.

Windows 7 Starter worked really well and moved along at a good speed – and none of the performance-sapping features had been turned off (such as menu animations, etc). It’s a shame that this isn’t available after-market – if I wanted to upgrade my own Netbook to Windows 7 I’d have to buy Windows 7 Home Premium, as even Home Basic isn’t available retail. Yet, I’d not use (or turn off) the extra features that Home Premium would give me. £70+ Windows upgrade for a Netbook that cost me £200 a number of years ago? The maths doesn’t make sense.

Back to the HP, it has all the standard connectors, including VGA, 3 USB ports and a card reader. However, it had a side mounted power switch on which the power light was mounted – this makes it awkward at first glance to see the power state of the HP when the screen is blank. Similarly, they’ve out the HD activity light on the other side – again difficult to glance at. There’s a VGA webcam and, unlike many netbooks, Bluetooth is present as standard (although I couldn’t see any switches or lights related to it). There are also no “hatches” underneath for upgrading the miserly 1GB memory BUT, unlike other manufacturers, HP have made it easy to do just that. Behind the battery are buttons which release the whole of the coloured underside and allow direct access to the underside of the components, including the hard drive and single memory slot. This means that the memory can be upgraded to 2GB and without even taking out a screw.

Speaking of the battery – this is a 6 cell which light tests have shown to give over 8 hours of life. It sticks out the bottom quite a way and, in the model I was looking at, seemed a little loose. None-the-less, the size doesn’t get in the way and the battery life is excellent.

Additional software I didn’t get a chance to try out, but it appears to come with the usual manufacturer software plus some additional branded software – Microsoft Works, Cyberlink DVD suite and Arcsoft webcam, for instance. It also comes with a fair share of trials and crapware that you’ll just end up uninstalling anyway.

The specific model I tried no longer appears to be available, but others are. For instance, the Mini 210 WR430EA is £280 at play.com.

Summary of HP Mini 210

The price puts the HP Mini 210 in the higher price band for Netbooks and you can see why – a long battery life and excellent build quality make this an easy to use and speedy Netbook. If I was in the market to buy another, I’d look seriously at the HP.

Reviewed by David Artiss on 3rd December 2010.

Gallery

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Simply sign up – it’s incredibly easy to do – and then search for an online retailer. Click on the link and you’re taken to the relevant website. Buy your item and you’ll find Quidco “tracks” a certain amount of cashback – this is listed on the site under your profile details, where you can also see payments (which occur regularly direct to your bank account).  The amount of cashback is dependant on retailer and is listed along with the retailers link.

I regularly use it, for instance, when buying from Play.com. The one notable omission is the lack of Amazon for cashback.

Never-the-less, I’ve recently got £40 back from a £200 home insurance and my wife last night bought a new phone on contract and received an extra (on top of cash back from the retailer) £40. It’s free money, basically.

If you use Firefox, Chrome or IE 7 or 8 you can even add Quidco as a search engine – making the whole process even less hassle.

Quidco WordPress Shortcode

Quidco offer a “refer a friend” service. If you go into the “Referral Earnings” screen, they will provide you with generic Quidco links to add to your site, but also specific links for retailers. I’ve therefore created my own little shortcode that will add this to my site.

Here’s the code, which needs to be added to functions.php…

add_shortcode('quidco','add_quidco');
function add_quidco($paras="",$content="") {
    extract(shortcode_atts(array('alt'=>''),$paras));
    if ($alt!="") {$lookup=$alt;} else {$lookup=$content;}
    $lookup=strtolower(str_replace(".","-",$lookup));
    return '<a href="http://www.quidco.com/user/xxx/yyy/'.str_replace(" ","_",$lookup).'" title="'.$content.'" title="'.$content.'" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">'.$content.'</a>';
}

You’ll need to replace xxx and yyy with the user specific information that’s shown in the “Referral Earnings” screen. Now simply placed [quidco] and [/quidco] around any shop names, and it will an automatic link to the appropriate Quidco referral screen. Hopefully. Dots are replaced by dashes but, obviously, if you write the shop name different to how Quidco refers to them, it may not work. In this case, specify the name as an additional parameter of ALT.

e.g. Two ways to link to play.com, both will work the same – [quidco]play.com[/quidco] or [quidco alt="play-com"]play.com[/quidco]

Note that when using the ALT parameter, you must specify the shop name as Quidco uses it in it’s link (e.g. with the dots converted to hyphens).

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Different versions appear to come packaged differently – mine, marketed as the Kitpower Deskmate, came in a transparent plastic box. A USB cable (which is, bizarrely, white when everything else, including all other cables are black) connects the stand to your PC – a blue light glows at the front and it provides power and connectivity to the card reader and USB ports. An additional cable connects to the back and provides power to your device via a number of interchangeable tips.

The card reader is an 8-in-1 (M2/Micro SD/MS/MS Pro Duo/SD/MMC/RS MMC/Mini SD). In my case this is very handy, because it will accept Micro SD cards without the need for an adapter.

The phone is held on the device via a slightly sticky pad – when I first received it, my phone kept slipping off but a quick wipe with a damp cloth and it appeared better. However, after a few days of not being used over the bank holiday weekend (I have it on my desk at work), it’s gathered a little more dust and the phone is slipping again – it’s holding properties are certainly not as good as some reviews have made out.

My version came from play.com and cost just £12.99 (including P&P). 7dayshop are selling a version for just £7.99, but beware that this does not coming with the charging cable or tips! However, they do have a version in white.

Summary of Desk Genie

Cheap and has a very handy multi-card reader. Not sure about it’s holding ability, and that’s key to this being of use. None-the-less, as a generic phone stand it’s good value.

Reviewed by David Artiss on 4th May 2010.

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Here’s what I’ve found.

Case

Black Gel Case

Having got a cheap, rubber “skin” case for my daughters Tocco Lite, I thought I’d get something similar. I bought a colour-coded (well, transparent but with a blackish hue)  “gel” case from eBay for the grand total of £2.90 (including postage). And it’s.. ok. It’s not like the more rubbery case of my daughters (with that it covers the buttons and you press them through the case, hence why it needs to be quite flexible) but it a harder material. It protects well but collects dust and crumbs quite easily.

Click the thumbnail to the right to see it a little clearer.

Screen Protectors

Again, I bought some screen protectors for my daughters phone. I got 10 and they were cheap from eBay. What I found was that your finger doesn’t glide over them as well as they did over the screen. Over time it gets better (probably as the grease from your finger penetrates the plastic).

However, it did mean that I made the decision to get some better quality ones for my Hero. HTC make “official” screen protectors, named the “SP P260″. Play.com sell them for £4.99 for 2. The price is high but it fitted well and felt good under the finger in use (in fact it’s difficult to tell that I’ve got one fitted). A definite recommendation.

Memory Card

The HTC Hero takes SD/SDHC Micro cards. It actually comes with a Sandisk 2GB card which, I believe, is class 2 (the slowest type of card). Now, what speed card you need seems to be a bit of an unknown quantity – some people on forums it makes a speed difference, others say different. Certainly, it seems likely that when Android can run applications from the SD card, then this will make a difference.

Looking at prices, 8GB is the best current price-point – you pay quite a premium to buy 16GB.

Initially I purchased a card from 7dayshop, who have been reliable in the past. Unfortunately, after 1.5 weeks they still hadn’t despatched my order. I contacted them and they said..

your order has been processed and will be dispatched shortly. Unfortunatly we are very busy at this time. Apologies for any inconvenience

Busy? What’s higher on their “to do list” than processing customer orders? Poor.

After waiting another half a week I contacted them and asked them to cancel my order. They did but I’m still awaiting my refund.

I did some further searching and came across ZoomBits (formerly MemoryBits). From them I purchased a Transcend 8GB Micro SDHC Class 6 card for £16.05. It was despatched the next day.

Car Charger

Although the USB connector on the HTC Hero looks to be specific to the device it is, in fact, a standard micro USB connection. Therefore any USB cable can be used for charging, and a search on eBay will show many USB chargers that plug into a car cigarette lighter – all you need to do is provide the requisite cable.

And, to be honest, you may already have one – my TomTom uses the same USB connector so I can charger my Hero with the car charger for that.

Docking Cradle

A docking cradle can be an ideal way to neatly charge and syncronise your phone. There appears to be 2 types available – an “official” HTC version (which is a flat black panel on which the phone sits vertically – very stylish but expensive) and a small, cheap one (eBay is a good place to look).

The latter appears to be in 2 different (but subtle designs) – one seems to rely on the USB connector to keep the phone vertical, whereas another has clear plastic “mounts” to hold it into place – the latter appears to me to be the best but is harder to get hold of.

I decided against any. The battery in the Hero is, let’s be honest, rubbish and so it needs a charge each night – I just use the mains charger to do this. During the day, at work, it sits next to me at my desk. It doesn’t need charging and, for security reasons, I can’t connect it to my PC to synchronise (not that I use the software).

Besides, would they work with the case fitted?

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Anyway, I contacted Dabs and they collected it and refunded my money. All credit to Dabs for excellent customer service.

So, the hunt was one for a replacement. I could, of course, go for the same one, but the backlight issue was a big disconcerting, so I thought I’d look out for something else. I’m not always a brand snob but when it comes to a product such as this I am. Digital photo frames are the kind of odd product that are rarely reviewed, so you often have to rely instead on blind buying and hoping.

I looked at the usual suspects – play.com, ebuyer, etc – but they mainly rely on unbranded makes. Dabs, however, continued to impress with a good range that were of interest. And one really stuck out – a Sony wireless photo frame.

It was launched late last year with a flurry of good reviews (yes, there are some for this!). It has the usual array of memory slots, an excellent quality screen (although only 7″, but that’s the size of the HP one that I had before), wireless capability (including the ability to download photos from Picasa Web Albums – something I use for my online photos!), even a browser and the ability to scroll news feeds across the top of the photos. The only down point of this whole product was its buggy browser (which is odd, as it’s the Opera browser), but then this wasn’t a capability that I was particularly interested in.

Play.com sell this photo frame for £230. Dabs have it for £84. Oh yes, that’s right. Just 84 of your finest English pounds. Both of those prices include VAT and P&P.

The reason is simple – it’s a discontinued line. Other retailers appear to be selling it cheap, it just appears that Play hasn’t caught up. None-the-less, considering this was the kind of price it was selling for when released less than a year ago, this is a truly excellent bargain.

It’s due sometime next week – once I have my mits on it, expect a thorough review.

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Having recently purchased a DSi and a new compact camera, I’ve been looking at SD memory cards.

My usual stops are MyMemory and Play.com – both provide a good range, cheap price and free P&P. However, after looking through both and noting down the best prices for the various card capacities and speeds, I have some recommendations for anybody else wanting to purchase.

SDHC cards (those are the cards of 4GB capacity and above) have 3 speed ratings – 2, 4 and 6 – 6 being the quickest. However, devices never seem to recommend a particular speed so I always plump for type 6 to be on the safe side.

First of all it’s obvious that the worst price can be found in the lower and upper end of the markets – 1-2GB, 16GB and above. 1-2GB can cost you anything between £2.25 and £4 a GB. From 16GB upwards, it will cost you up to £2.81 a GB. Never-the-less there are still some bargains in the higher range to be had.

I won’t link to each card – first of all, because it will take me an age, but also because prices change as does availability, so by the time you get around to looking at them, it may have all changed. This is simply a guide to give you an idea as to where to aim. Besides the only reason why the highest capacity cards are such poor value is because they’re relatively new to the market – given time their price will drop and as the smaller capacities are chosen less, their cost will go up. Thankfully there is a ceiling as SDHC cards have a maximum 32GB capacity¹.

Star Buy

Let’s start with my star buy – the cheapest price per GB. Play.com sell a 16GB type 4 SDHC card for £17.99. This equates to £1.12 a GB.

Best Buys

Of course, not everybody would want that capacity or speed rating, so let’s see the best in each category (I’ve avoided certain sizes due to lack of availability)…

By Size

Best SD (i.e. 2GB and below) Card – 2GB for £4.49 from Play.com

Best 4GB SDHC Card – Type 4 for £6.49 from Play.com

Best 6GB SDHC Card -  Type 4 for £10.99 from MyMemory

Best 8GB SDHC Card -  Type 4 for £10.49 from Play.com

Best 16GB SDHC Card – Type 4 for £17.99 from Play.com

Best 32GB SDHC Card – Type 4 for £69.99 from Play.com

By Speed Rating

Best Type 2 SDHC Card – 8GB for £11.99 from MyMemory

Best Type 4 SDHC Card – 16GB for £17.99 from Play.com

Best Type 6 SDHC Card – 8GB for £10.99 from Play.com

Complete List

And, finally, here is the complete list of cards sizes and speeds, and the best price for each.

1GB – £3.95 – MyMemory
2GB – £4.49 – Play.com
4GB Type 2 – £6.99 – MyMemory
4GB Type 4 – £6.49 – Play.com
4GB Type 6 – £6.99 – MyMemory
6GB Type 4 – £10.99 – MyMemory
8GB Type 2 – £11.99 – MyMemory
8GB Type 4 – £10.49 – Play.com
8GB Type 6 – £10.99 – Play.com
16GB Type 2 – £34.99 – MyMemory
16GB Type 4 – £17.99 – Play.com
16GB Type 6 – £26.99 – MyMemory
32GB Type 2 – £89.99 – MyMemory
32GB Type 4 – £69.99 – Play.com

1. after that you’ll have to move to the little known SDXC format which has a 2TB capacity – having said that, SDHC can and it’s only the specification that limits this

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My provider rang me yesterday asking if I wanted to end my current contract early, and they’d send me a new phone. Well, offers like that I can’t refuse. Especially when they provide me with free internet access on it too.

So, I’ve moved from a Sony Ericsson K800i to the Nokia N95 8Gb, replete with Wi-fi connection and 5mp phone. Hmmm.

Now, if you get one of these, I’d recommend heading to play.com where they do a splendid leather case for it, along with car power cables and the like for just a few points – cheaper than you can get them on eBay.

One thing I have had problems with was my wi-fi connection at home. The connection keeps dropping out. Thankfully a quick Google found my answer, thanks to a forum post. It would appear this is – erm – side effect of having a Netgear modem. It can be worked around though.

Lastly if, like me, you use Google to organise your life I’d like to recommend GooSync, which enables you, free, to sync your Google Calendar with your phone (and not just the N95 – many others). For some cash (about £2 a month) you can get them to sync multiple calendars plus (crucially for me) your Google contacts.

The aforementioned problem with my router also affected GooSync working too – however, as the sync problem occurred first I didn’t initially know I had a much wider issue. However, GooSync have an excellent contact system, as well as forums. I’m always grateful when products such as these come with good support. In the end, though, I found out the above router fix before I got a response, but ended up posting the above to their forums as well (you never know, it may affect someone else too).

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They no longer have a way of being contacted online – you have to phone them. And after experiencing 20 minute delays just after Christmas, I was in no mood for such delays.

Today I gave them 10 before hanging up and then cancelling my order. If they’d an online method of being contacted, I would have been quite happy to have waited a day or two for a reply. What I don’t have time for is hanging on a phone, especially when I’m “in a queue” and being charged for it.

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