Blykwatch - On Holiday
Ewan has been swanning off round the Maldives and Whatley has been playing with his mobile things in the mud at Glastonbury. It’s time for me to take my holiday , however unlike my two colleagues I will not be taking any mobile wizardry with me except my holiday phone (SE W610i) and my T-Mobile Contract. So BlykWatch is taking a break for a few weeks, (I think it’s only fair we leave Blyk alone for few weeks) so as you are reading this I will be in 35,000 ft in the sky travelling to Singapore, Malaysia and then Thailand.
Above is a photo of where I will be spending a week of my holiday however it’s not all relaxation ;), I will be looking how the mobile markets are over there and how normobs are using their phones, so standby for a blog post about that when I get back if I have anything interesting to report!
Ok enough about where I am spending my holiday, time to look at the issue at hand Blyk.
Two weeks ago I reported that I would tell you about roaming on Blyk as I saw a post on the forum that said Blyk have some roaming partners very soon. I got excited, ok sad I know but I did so a scribbled an email to member care and got a response. It seems like Blyk have had to push back plans for roaming partners therefore guess what Nada nothing I can’t use my Blyk sim outside the UK. Even Tesco Mobile have bloody roaming, surely it’s not hard for MVNO’s to have roaming partners as they just use the same one as their host network. So a dropped them another email, about call divert (if I can’t roam surely I can divert my calls to my primary handset), yeah you guessed it they don’t support it, along with Premium SMS messages, Delivery Reports, the option to turn off voicemail and PAC codes (you can see why Blyk has lots of members, you can’t leave them with your own number). It just really frustrates me as Blyk has been about nearly a year and yet we don’t have all the basic features of a pay as you go provider, yet there are announcing that they are expanding. Hellooo we in the UK have massive problems and not many features and yet they think they can expand. Good luck to them I say, they will need it!
All the stuff above I can live with JUST, if I had a decent service, which currently Blyk Members are still not receiving. The regularly readers will know over the past month we have had to endure the multiple messages saga and now the current issue is to with settings and receiving MMS messages from Blyk (Communication Error). Luckily my issues since my last post have been pretty much resolved and things are work normally yet on the forum you the same issues keep coming up and up. I generally believe member care has no idea how to resolve the issues and it’s quite worrying. Over the past week one Blyk member was told by member care to go online to look at the forums for answer, another member who had issues receiving settings was told to put the sim in another location outside their current post code (roughly about 1 mile away) and wait 4 hours for the settings to come through. What a complete joke, I can’t believe customer care at a mobile operator are suggesting such things. It seems that Blyk are taking a holiday in regards to the forums as well as their staff response is very low over the past week and members are stuck helping each other to get their service working again.
All very worrying don’t you think? I have no idea what’s going on at customer care at Blyk, however whatever it is they need to sort it out quickly before they start losing customers. I have said it before and I will say it again when Blyk works, it is a really good service but it’s all these little issues all the time that annoy and ultimately stop me switching my primary handset to them.
Now let’s look at the brand messages I have been receiving;
Saturday 28th June
MMS brand message advertising for Pure Urban Essentials 2008, looks like a wicked album it is on a must to buy, at the bottom of the message was to enter a draw to win a Sony Ericsson w890i. Which I entered of course!
Sunday 29th June
A sms advertising the film AdultHood, now this contained a mobile link. The mini site had reviews, synopsis trailers and ringtones to download as well. WICKED, this is what I have been talking about for month’s mobile content I can browse and download what I want instead of being sent information by MMS. I love it a great feature of Blyk. Imagine me chatting with a mate saying what shall we see at the cinema, instead of both saying don’t know, I can say look, whip out my phone and show him the trailer and the review!
Monday 30th June
A fashion forecast mms, detailing the weather and suggesting clothes to wear during the week. I also received a sms advertising a new single from The Long Blonds and giving me a web link where I can buy the song for 50p. Finally I received a MMS with a short video clip from Ironik, who and I quote from the MMS ‘The UK’s hottest new urban artist’, they also tell me I can get the track on itunes or buy it in the shops and a link to his myspace. I kind of liked the song from the clip so I may YouTube to see what the whole thing is like. In fact here is the link. I kind of like it, however I will wait for the comments that say otherwise.
Tuesday 1st July
A usual MMS from t3 talking about High Definition to terrestrial, nothing new I find t3 messages quite boring now. I also received a MMS big brother update.
Friday 4th July
A sms asking if I won last week on the lottery, I hardly think if I won I would respond to Blyk ad’s however I did reply with no and I was sent a MMS telling me I would receive £1 off!
Saturday 5th July
A sms from STA informing me out BA student fares with a mobile link; however it seems the link is not compatible with my phone and it just says unsupported content. Oh well!
That’s all for this week! The next scheduled edition of BlykWatch is not until Monday 4th August, however with Blyk you know when the next edition will come.
My account is now on Pause and I am officially on Holiday!
