New phone

I bought a new smart phone yesterday. I did so not because the curre4nt one wasn't good, but because it was LOCKED to TELSTRA. 

I've had a land-line and broadband with Telstra/Bigpond for a fair while and never had any trouble with them (or at least not any that couldn't be resolved. I've even had a Telstra pre-paid on the old 12 key type phones. But having the Telstra smart phone was not a good experience. When I used to have Vodafone, I could get a 365 day prepaid for $30. I had to get at least $70 worth with Telstra. And I discovered that $60 of this disappeared on the smart phone within a month. And I'd made maybe 6 calls on it! 

When I went into a Telstra shop to ask how that was the case I was told they couldn't say and I'd have to phone some department to find out. NOT GOOD ENOUGH. But I should have expected that from what's a essentially a sales outlet rather than a service one. It seems that with smart phones some apps stay on even when you didn't think you were using it, using up bandwidth all the time. :( 

Anyway Telstra just seem to be a bad choice. But to try something else I needed a phone that wasn't locked to them. I bought a Huawei Deuce U8520 from Dick Smith. It was a returned item and was marked down and I got an extra year's warranty on it.

Seems OK, and it turns out that it's a dual SIM phone, which I wasn't aware off at the time as I just wanted to buy the cheapest unlocked smart phone I could find. That means I can transfer my Telstra SIM into it, plus another one as well. I might just go back to Vodafone. They've been advertising a lot lately, including regular updates on your $$$ usage. I transferred the Telstra SIM over and it works, but you can't use both at once.

So far the only problem is that I can't mount an SD card. Will be popping into Dick Smith today to sort that one out!