It's the magic number

[venta]

At present I'm in the throes of switching my mobile service provider from Vodafone to 3. Last night I discovered that the 3 and Vodafone SIMs will not work in each other's phones, thus making it rather tricky to get my phone numbers from old phone to new phone. Despite the PC suite associated with my old phone providing extensive methods of backing up one's MMSs, it didn't provide any means of downloading the phone book.

I rang 3's customer services. To be honest, I didn't think it was really their problem, but I was curious as to how helpful they'd be. One of my worries switching to 3 was that since the contract costs peanuts compared to what I've been paying Vodafone, the customer service might be done by monkeys. Also, I have to admit to a deep seated prejudice: Vodafone's call centre is in England - somewhere round Tyneside judging from the accents. 3's call centres are staffed by people who appear to have the slightly mechanical English of a resident of the Asian sub-continent reading from a script. I've had a few bad experiences of call centre drones who, not speaking great English, can't really handle non-standard enquiries.

So, I rang 3 and explained the problem. The lady I was speaking to agreed with me that transferring numbers one at a time via Bluetooth didn't sound like fun, and suggested that the 3 SIM might work in the Vodafone handset - and rang me back on my landline so I could try it while talking to her. When it didn't, she reckoned that the updated version of the PC suite would allow downloading of the phone book as a data transfer, and left me installing it.

Sadly, even when the very long install was over, I couldn't work out how to download the phonebook. So far, so not-that-great. I rang 3 back to ask if they could explain better how to do this. I got a bloke who asked why I didn't just do it via Bluetooth. I explained. He asked for the make and model of my old Vodafone phone, muttered a bit, and then explained in nice, short words how to download the entire phone book via Bluetooth. Hurrah. Actually, when he was mid-explanation the line dropped out because reception in our front room is awful for any network. He immediately rang me back and took up where he left off.

So... although I wouldn't hail it as an unqualified success, by call centre standards they were pretty helpful. They certainly don't seem to be monkeys, anyway. And they seem to have worked out something Vodafone never did - they can identify me from the number I'm calling on. Obviously, for security reasons they'd still need to check it was me, but for last night's purposes it meant they knew what model phone I had without having to ask.

However, it did dawn on me this morning that having a back-up of my phone book would be really useful. I don't suppose anyone happens to know how to download the contacts from a Sony Ericsson phone using Sony's PC Suite?

Comments

[hirez.livejournal.com]

IIRC, when I moved from a Nokia on Voda to a(n) SE on 3, I got the (supremely useless and hateful) Nokia s/w to emit the address-book as Winders address-book contacts, tided that up a bit, uninstalled the Nokia s/w (then set fire to the disc and jumped on it a bit out of a sense of duty), installed the SE s/w which went 'Shall I import your Winders address-book?' and all was reasonably lovely.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I had hoped for something like that, but all I got was whinging that the PC Suite couldn't start Outlook. Well, no, that's because I don't have Outlook installed. I thought Winders was supposed to be able to maintain a non-Outlook-related address book, but saw no evidence of same.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I'm fairly sure it does. [programs|accessories|addressbook]

Strange.

[uitlander]

I believe that Mr Given owns a Sim reader. IIRC we used this when I faced a similar problem a few years back.

[stompyboots.livejournal.com]

Actually, Vodafone's biggest call centre is in Banbury, right up the road. Although they do all sound Tyneside to me, too.