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Google Hardware Support

Ironically just 5 days after writing about how I choose Android devices for a long service life [1] my wife’s Nexus 5 (with 32G of RAM (sorry Flash storage) to give it a long useful life) totally died. It reported itself as being fully charged and then 15 minutes later it was off and could […]

Android Device Service Life

In recent years Android devices have been the most expensive things I’ve purchased apart from airline tickets and other travel/holiday expenses. As they are expensive I’d like to use them for as long as possible to get the most value for money. Also as I give my devices to relatives when they no longer work […]

My First Ingress Anomaly

Ingress is an Android phone game developed by Google where you have to go to various places to capture “portals” which are based on landmarks or places of note. There’s a sci-fi back story which I haven’t cared much about (my local library has a heap of good sci-fi books I don’t have time […]

Aldi Deserves an Award for Misleading Email

Aldi Mobile has made a significant change to their offerings. They previously had an offer of $35 for “unlimited” calls and 2.5G of data in a month for which they had to publicly apologise for misleading customers as 2500 minutes of calls a month (83 minutes per day) is no-where near unlimited [1]. They also […]

Aldi Changes, Cheap Telcos, and Estimating Costs

I’ve been using Aldi as my mobile phone provider for two months now since Kogan was shut down [1]. Now Aldi have cut the transfer quota on their “Unlimited” plan from 5G per month to 2.5G per month. The most charitable interpretation of this would be that Aldi got a lot of former Kogan customers […]

The End of Kogan Mobile

Kogan Mobile has just announced that Telstra succeeded in it’s attempt to break it’s contract with ISPone and thus end the Kogan Mobile business [1]. Over the last few years there has been a trend for all Australian telcos to increase mobile phone costs. There are some pre-paid companies that offer reasonable deals for people […]

Effective Conference Calls

I’ve been part of many conference calls for work and found them seriously lacking. Firstly there’s a lack of control over the call, so when someone does something stupid like putting an unmuted phone handset near a noise source there’s no way to discover who did it and disconnect them.

Another problem is that of […]

Kogan Mobile

Kogan Mobile is the newest virtual telco in Australia [1]. They resell Telstra 3G (not NextG or LTE) and while their coverage isn’t as good as the full Telstra service it’s more than adequate for my needs as they provide 3G coverage to 97% of the population and 2G+3G coverage to 98.5%. Their coverage is […]