Category: Life

Well, I did say I might mention it in a later Blog.

First of all an explanation of why I’ve stopped moaning about nuisance mobile phones and bought one…. the other Friday I was due to pick my daughter up from her mums. And it snowed. Not just a little but a lot. A blizzard really and I couldn’t see the lines on the road let alone anything ahead. Meantime my daughter was stuck at school, her mum unable to reach her.

It was just luck that I’d remembered to take my emergency (pay-as-you-go cheap n’ nasty) mobile out of the boot and had it turned on – I got the phone call from her mum to tell me what was happening and we decided in the end to call it off – I’d pick her up when the weather cleared the next morning. Meantime I’d found somewhere to pull over.

So all of this made me realise that having a mobile – a proper one that I have turned on all the time – might be a good idea. It would also help during my (oh my god it’s less than 3 months) wedding. Oh, and a pay rise at work helped justify it as well.

So after some research I plumped for the Sony Ericsson K800i. The high quality camera also further helped justify it (as I then wouldn’t be caught shot of not having a camera when I needed one). And I got a Bluetooth headset for it as well.

And I have to say, it’s very good, although accessing the phone contents on my PC via Bluetooth is flaky (not that it’s an issue – Bluetooth file transfer is so damn slow). I got a hard transparent case for it along with a 1Gb micro memory stick from mymemory.co.uk – very, very cheap price. Recommended.

I also managed to get it, eventually, to allow traffic uploads to my TomTom One. However, it wasn’t clear cut – my phone kept complaining about a “Connection Failure”. I spoke to Carphone Warehouse (whom I bought the phone from) and they, handily (I’m kidding), told me to visit one of their shops (what is the point of phone support if that’s there answer!). Meantime I’d posted my problem on a GPS forum and they came back with an answer.

If you have the same problem (or again, this will be useful to remind myself of the answer), then you need to do the following:

• On your phone navigate to the following:Settings|Connectivity|Data Communications|Data Accounts
• Select your data account and then ‘More,’ then select ‘Account Info’ and note the number against ‘External ID.’
• Now, when the TomTom errors, you get a prompt to enter the details manually. Do this and skip through most of the information.
• When it prompts for the dial information it will probably look something like this:*99***3#The number 3 here should be set to your phones External ID.
• Next, your logon will appear as something like this:at+cgdcont=3,”ip”,”internet”,””,0,0All of this depends on your account and various bits may be different. However, once again the 3 should be your External ID. Change that bit too.

And that was it (although I’d be curious to know how long it would have taken CPW to have worked that one out!).