Grombles

So my iPhone 4S fell on the floor. The screen crazed and my old faithful finally joined every other iPhone in the house. Tricky to read and not worth stealing. But it was only a couple of weeks away from the release of the much vaunted 6 and my network contract had expired long ago. These days I buy SIM only contracts with EE. Vastly better coverage than the loathsome Vodafone and O2, and cheaper to boot. So what I needed was an unlocked 6. No problem. Ordered it on Apple's website and within a few days it arrived. Hurrah. Although Apple did send me an SMS text to my old iPhone with a link to a website that an iPhone can't read! iTwats. Now the most important thing not to do to an iPhone, as I had already discovered, is drop it. The fancy box it arrives in has a tight fitting lid that you have to pull off as the increasing vacuum inside tries to stop you. Finally the lid popped off, releasing my precious and precariously balanced, as I now discovered, £700 iPhone. In slow ...

Every two years I switch to one of the other four UK mobile network providers because a) my memory of the last time I was one of their customers has faded, b) I have a mistaken expectation that they've done something in the meantime to improve their service, and c) I'm bored or angry with my mobile and hope that a new one might suddenly work better as a phone (why did I ever abandon my old Nokia?). We all know every mobile operator offers a patchy service in the UK. Most of their money goes into marketing. Clearly very little goes into increasing their coverage. What's even more annoying is that we've grown to accept this in the UK (where our declining economy has just been overtaken by Brazil!). Everywhere else on this planet the service is brilliant. We're told its crap because: a) we're all watching porn, football and soaps like Coronation Street on our mobiles, and that's used up the bandwidth (which of course is bollocks, because no-one CAN watch an...