July 19, 2007 - Carphone Warehouse 0, O2 1.
I’ve had the same mobile phone number since I was 18. I’ve had the same mobile phone for the last six years too – a Samsung A300. This has been a cause of mockery from some people, just because I look after a phone and don’t replace it every 6 months. It was a great phone at the time but the speaker in it is damaged and some of the buttons have stopped working properly now, so I decided to get a new one. After investigating, I chose a Samsung U600.
I ordered the new handset from the Carphone Warehouse, because they seemed to be the only people who had it on my phone tarrif. I gave work’s address for delivery. Everything looked fine in the confirmation e-mail, but in the shipping e-mail the delivery address had changed to home! Why offer an alternative delivery address if you’re going to ignore it?! Oh, and the shipping e-mail was written in bad HTML so that it looked like this: 
Fortunately there was a plain text part too. As I suspected, I couldn’t use GPRS or MMS on the new phone with my old SIM in it. I called O2 customer services and spoke to a nice guy called James who said that GPRS and MMS hadn’t been enabled on my number. Although they could probably be enabled on my old SIM he said it was worth moving my number to the new SIM as the old one was probably near the end of its service life and the new SIM would be pre-configured with all the right service numbers. He sounded a bit surprised that I’d not had to be shipped a replacement one in the last six years. He left me some very clear instructions and within three hours my number had been moved to the new SIM. I got a couple of text messages which I allowed to automatically configure the WAP and MMS settings on the new handset. Brilliant stuff!
Now, just have to hope it works in Belgium…
