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 ...

I'm truly sick of Vodafone ( after having been sicker of O2 ). Both networks aren't networks in that a network is meant to connect things - and my phone doesn't connect to anything most of the time. Vast swathes of the UK are invisible to it, but especially the barren unpopulated wastes (not) of Surrey. My biggest gromble is about the lack of signal (3G especially) that I experience on the train between Guildford (county town of Surrey) and London - a distance of around 35 miles through some of the most densely populated parts of the planet. Wealthy too. At best you get a Vodafone signal for half the journey and perhaps only 5% of it is usable for data (ie 3G). This independent comparison research explains why I decided to experiment with a new network, EE (Everything Everywhere), who have combined the masts of Orange and T-Mobile: I have an iPhone 4S on a Vodafone contract which recently expired. So I'm due either an upgrade from them or I can easily move to a n...

Every time I plug it in, my iJobs insists I upgrade its operating system. It requires about 1GB of download to install. After weeks of nagging pop-ups I finally decided to let it run - despite the fact my iJobs has been performing 'normally' up to this point. How easily we forget the countless times in the past when we've 'upgraded' only to discover that we've unleashed system clash hell on our increasingly confused hardware, only to bitterly regret the decision, again and again. But we always hope that this upgrade will solve all our problems - like my iJobs not picking up a mobile or wifi signal perhaps - and delight us with something new and amazing. Make it a better telephone would be top of my wishlist Mr JobsV2.0 if you're reading this. So I finally give in and click 'OK'. I need to leave it running overnight since our internet bandwidth into the house only permits the occasional lonely passing byte to squeeze down the phone line every now a...