Needed to buy a new phone because Rogers is no longer worrying about
1900 coverage and my handset predated 850.
Settles on the Nokia 6300. Went to the Fido store only to find out that
Fido had removed the email application and added some fido stuff to the
menus. That was a show stopper.
But I also realised that the 6300 was available unlocked from shops for
about the same price. (when you include headet and memory card).
I confirmed with Nokia sup****t that the 6300 does indeed have email.
Their web site confirms this when you look at the technical specs for
Messaging. And googling the web/newsgroups also confirmed people weer
discussing the email application on the 6300.
Nokia had confirmed that network operators are free to add/remove what
they want, but that if I bought a phone that is not from a network, it
would have all those features enabled.
So I set out to seek a store that had a good price and who was legit
enough to answer phones and confirm that they get their phones from
Nokia's distributor. (Nokia refuses to list authorized resellers).
Found Mobile City Online, based on NYC which had good price and willing
to ****p to Canada without using UPS (UPS charges $30 for customs
handling fees that week, and is to be avoided at all costs).
So, they guys en up ****pping air mail instead of Express. The package
takes 10 days to get to Canada, and then, as luck would have it, gets
stuck at customs for no reason. One had to argue quite a bit to have
Canada Post start an investigation if you are not the sender. But in the
end, they found it yesterday night and I got the phone today.
Yeah ! Except for the idiot who posted the item and inflated the price
of the unit, forcing me to dish out more money for GST/QST. By still:
"Yeah !"
Not so fast... The very feature I wanted in the phone, the email client
is MISSING !
<long list of 4 letter worlds omitted from this post, but just imagine a
constant stream of steam coming out of my ears>.
So, I call Nokia. Spent 3 hours on the phone. One tech sup****t agent had
a 6300 in his hands and he had the email features on his. BUt clearly
missing from the same menus when I should have had those. Turns out I
have a more recent software version. But the tech guy can offer 0 help,
unwilling to look in the "new features" do***ent to see what was changed
between his version and my version etc. Of course, prior to that, one
has to convince them that you have a genuine Nokia phone that has been
unhacked, and Nokia then tells you that there are no authorized
resellers on north america etc etc etc.
So I call back, this time customer service to advise I have a phone
which does not match the specs on their web site. Same arguments again
from him, refusing to see the possibility that I have a legitimate
phone, even after verifying that the IMEI is legit and not belonging to
a network.
In the end, the guy, after checking, admits that Nokia has removed the
email software from that phone in recent releases. No reason given, and
Nokia USA is waiting from Nokia Finland for a reason. This could take
forever.
So now, I am stuck having to beg that store to take the unit back and
give me a refund. I already had enough diofficulty convincing them I
needed a refund for the express ****pping which they didn't use. Won't be
pretty.
I will see how that store reacts and if they are willing to wait an
extra week to see if Nokia gets some answer on why the software was
removed.
This has left me an extremely bitter taste of Nokia. Not so much the
missing feature, but the way they treated me on the phone wasting both
our times when they knew all along that email had been removed without
any reason given.
Pretty stupid when you consider that lower end Nokia phones have email
software, so why have their midrange product see its email client removed
?
(In case of Fido, since new subscribers gets a "sandbox" GPRS that
cannot access the internet, only those sites blessed by Fido), I could
see why the email client would be removed. But for Nokia that sells
6300s around the world, it is really really really stupid to remove a
published feature on a phone and not even update their web sites to
remove mention of that feature. It is false advertising.
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