A Tale of Customer Service

…so one of the main selling points about the Nokia N810 is that it connects seamlessly to your smartphone, for things like Bluetooth modem-ing when you’re away from Wi-fi. It comes with a wizard to set this up, which is straightforward enough – especially when my smartphone is also Nokia (E65, geek-fans).

Except it utterly refused to connect to the net.

I repeated the process several times and got the same result. I’ve done the same thing sucessfully with my old Palm, so I know it’s neither the phone or the network directly to blame.

Since the gizmo is all of a day old, I ring PC World’s customer service. Their phone guy has no clue, can only look up the how-to online and he finds nothing.

Next step, thinks I, should be the phone network – in this case, Three. I phone them and get put through to a lady in the Indian subcontinent. She informs me that not only will they not entertain the notion of talking about a third-party gadget, she won’t even tell me basic Bluetooth modem settings for the machine I got from them.

I hang up, sigh, swear – and phone Nokia UK.

They have a recorded message informing me that due to technical difficulties, they cannot take phone calls right now. Yes – a phone company had their phones crash. Encouraging.

So I give up and go to what should have been Plan A in the first place – I google “nokia n810 three bluetooth modem”.

Second hit has the answer.

(Which was… the set-up wizard puts a typo into the connection settings. This consists of a single blank space appearing at the end of the connection URL. I find the URL, backspace, save. Problem fixed.)

In short – Google really is your friend.

(Meanwhile, the gizmo is running splendidly, especially since I flashed the harddrive with the latest OS upgrade. Thanks for guidance on doing that go to the splendid folk on Internet Tablet Talk.)

Upgrades

After struggling loyally with my old-school Palm PDA (a Sony Clie UX50, fact fans) for too damn long, I finally bit the bullet and got a new pocket machine. I’m posting this from a Nokia N810 Internet Tablet – tiny, shiny and full of the Modern Stuff. Things like GPS, 2 Gig of memory (expandable to at least 10), a web browser that actually lets me log onto forums… And it’s Linux-based, which means all kinds of open-source ‘ware.
And to aid the transition, there’s a Palm emulator, so I get to keep my old favourite apps.

Geek-boy happy. I’m sure you’ll hear more on the subject.