Frustration is not what I thought I had bought when I gave my Roger's Samsung e316 to my wife and bought a Telus Mobility Samsung SCH-a600 for myself.
With Rogers I was able to receive push messages and download wallpapers and ringtones on the fly from a variety of websites that charge no where near the fees that Telus Mobility charges. I thought that the inability to download was something to do with the phone (for the hype and the price, this phone is useless and as someone else mentioned earlier, I felt cheated - dang swivel flip was the eye-catcher, I think...) but a few more hours on the phone with Telus and next, Audiovox would prove me wrong; dead wrong.
Anyways, I took the swivelling Samsung back to the Telus store and thoroughly went through what else was available. I ended up with the Audiovox 8920T. But, do ya think that I can get any images or ringtones from anywhere other than the Telus website? Not a chance.
Pete has a point about this whole deal: why can Rogers offer us the "choice/option" while Telus doesn't? I was not expecting to come home and find that I can't do anything with my phone unless I want to deplete my credit card into Telus' coffers (heck, I have stocks in Telus, I want
their money) to get a bunch of silly images and ringtones.
Long searches around the Internet trying to find ringtone/image websites that even offer support to Telus Mobility customers failed completely: they all feed to
Rogers, in fact, to almost all
other providers, but not Telus (and us Canadians thought that Rogers was the one raking in our money with their phone monopoly). To boot, I rarely found the Audiovox make listed on any sites either (maybe that's why Telus uses them), adding to the sense of isolation.
So I have this cool Audiovox 8920T and its 1.3 mp camera; yes the sending and receiving of voice calls is super, the screen resolution is dynamite, the camera resolution rocks and it has a number of useful features but, I can't step outside of the box to use it as I wish. Something is wrong with the math there. Remember, with Rogers, I can jump leaps and bounds out of the box but Telus wants me, all of us, to pay $2.50, plus $0.50 for download fee, to get a wallpaper image from their site when I am getting them for my Rogers connected Samsung phone for $0.08 cents each from an independent website. And Rogers doesn't mind a bit.
Perhaps Telus should make their statements about their phones' capabilities a bit clearer rather than just stating "downloadable ringtones and images". How's the average Joe going to know that that means
only from Telus until he/she buys the danged thing and has signed a contract that can't be simply cancelled? An upfront statement about non-compatibility (or should it be, "permission denied"?) would have been something that would perhaps help folks understand, before hand, that there could be an issue if they were to want to download/upload goodies to their Telus cellphones. But then again, the drop in sales would probably force the company to start making fridges or something.
After my positive experience with Rogers (I also find the reception/signal to be much better than with Telus) I just presumed that all of the phones/service providers would somehow behave similarly - nothing was there to make me think otherwise. Wrong.
Remember when we were kids? What did we put our money in? A cute little
piggy bank. And what is Telus now using to brand their name? Two cute, little
piggies. Hmmm, do I smell pork, or is it the smell of Telus making money? Maybe they're the same...
But yes, Telus quite clearly sees and understands the opportunity for vastly increasing their web-based goodies sales by being the
exclusive providers to their customers (well, they added in Much Music
*choke* and some other junk sites to make things look less obvious). And yes, they clearly understand that if someone really wants the stuff and can't get it anywhere else that they
will eventually end up on their website and fork out the extra dough for a few images and ringtones. After all,
they have no choice.
At any rate, I've moved from a post to a short novel so I'll just wrap up with this: if you want ringtones/images/games/etc. and downloads/uploads from/to your PC, then don't sign into a Telus contract. We do use these devices for more than just talking now and this sort of activity is quite popular, but it's also very expensive if you end up with Telus. Stick to buying their stocks; which will increase as their revenues from their website sales go up... Rogers, on the other hand is doing just fine and before becoming a dual-provider-customer I had no complaints.
I wish everyone luck and I should mention that I am waiting to hear back from this independent website about whether or not they can force through a Push message on my Audiovox or somehow bypass Telus' removal of the "Save Objects" browser Menu feature on their newer phones (funny, that Menu feature was available with the Samsung SCH-a600...) and I'll post here if the result is positive.
Cheers all,
Acadian
P.S. I should mention that this is the first site that I have seen that supports Telus. Shame that the Audiovox 8920, or any Audiovox (low on the totem pole as they might be) is not supported.