David Carrington

I’ve just ordered an HTC Diamond, with delivery expected on Thursday.

This will be my third HTC handset. It has the speed advantage of the first (HTC BlueAngel) and the size / style advantage of the second (HTC Touch). Combined together it makes one awesome phone!

What to do with the old phones? The HTC BlueAngel functions as my bedside MP3 player. The Touch is still a great phone and a tech-savy relative might like to get hold of it. We’ll see.

Over the last few days, I’ve been interested in various methods that I might get my hands on a new HTC Diamond phone. Each option has it’s ups and downs, but ultimately leaves me spending £150-400 for a phone that only does a fraction more than my existing HTC Touch (counting features that I’d actually use).

Sure, it’s got 3G and basically everything about it is a generation up from what my phone does, but I’m happy with what I’ve got. In fact, I’m really loving the new world that has been opened to me from having internet access wherever I go.

So far I’ve appreciated being able to do the following:

• Managing my Google Calendar remotely
• Watching for phones on Ebay Mobile
• Checking cinema listings
• Keeping an eye on motorway traffic
• Direct uploads to Flickr (no 25p MMS charge)

I’m barely eating up 1Mb / day with what I consider to be quite a fair amount of usage on GPRS. This gives me quite a lot of room to play with other ideas like IM and similar. I’m sure I’ll find a way to eat up the rest of my monthly allowance.

I fairly despise the Orange website for a number of reasons: loading screens, endless “sorry, an error occurred but we’re aware of it” links, and now a fairly useless new feature: usage since your last bill.

With all the talk of “Unlimited” features (texts and now data too), what I really want is the website to tell me some real numbers that represent my months usage. Why give me 47 pages of junk when all I need is a count which says I’ve used 2000 of my 3000 texts.

I imagine this page will be equally useless at telling me how much of my 500Mb fair usage of data I’ve used for the month. Luckily, I’m already looking into some software that will let me keep track of that directly from my phone. I’ll post a review once the data plan is enabled.

Orange have seen the light! they’ve updated a bunch of their pay monthly plans to include 500Mb of data transfer. This is great for me and other Orange customers, as the existing bundles were terrible (£5/month for unlimited off peak, £8/month for 30Mb anytime).

Special thanks goes to Krystal at SMS Text News for letting people know that you can get this added to your existing account.

The actual terms and conditions state the following:

1. These Offers are available to new and existing customers connecting or upgrading to an Eligible Talkplan (as defined below) between 1 March 2007 and 31 July 2007 (an ‘Eligible Customer’) and are subject to the additional Our Customers First terms.
2. The Offers are subject at all times to a fair usage policy of 3000 minutes or texts (as appropriate) each month or 500MB data per month (See Mobile Internet Bundles). Usage above this amount will constitute abuse and Orange may monitor usage and withdraw the Offer from your account if the fair usage policy is abused.

BBC News had an article on the UK government opening up a bunch of data for developers to play with the other day. I think it’s a real flaw in what’s most likely their article/linking policy that the actual link to the data is hidden on the right under the “Related Internet Links” section: Show Us a Better Way.

I’ve not had a chance to look at all of the available data, but it’s an interesting competition.