iPhone 4 to 4S and Vodafone to Telecom in under 24hrs

In my previous post, I was less than impressed with Telecom NZ**. However, in this post, I must say that I am extremely IMPRESSED with them.

You see, I recently got my hands on a new iPhone 4S, flawlessly migrated every single setting, app, contact, account and picture on my iPhone 4 to 4S using only iCloud (no cables at all), and then started using the "Siri" voice recognition abilities of the new phone. To say that Siri is impressive would be a BIG understatement. You can dictate txt messages to send, you can book appointments, you can dial, you can do all sorts of things. In addition, you can ask Siri such things as the meaning of life (and get an answer), you can ask it inappropriate things, such as "Do you love me", and get clever responses. In short, Siri is pretty bloody amazing.

However, the Siri service uses 3G data to send your voice to Apple servers to process and do the voice recognition, and this means that the service is only as good as the data service of your provider.

I have been a loyal Vodafone NZ customer for over 15 years, never really questioning that they were doing a good job, and regularly paying a phone bill of around $400 a month. I have suffered from having 1 bar of signal strength on my iPhone at my castor bay house, and generally blamed the iPhone and not vodafone, and figured that 3G data was just never going to be that great, and would never compete with DSL or wifi type speeds.

So it was with some amazement, that yesterday when my friend and I were playing with Siri, that he was getting almost immediate responses (via Telecom XT), and my phone barely seemed to be able to work (on Vodafone). That was the last straw for me, and I promptly walked into a Telecom XT store at 5pm yesterday and asked them to port my number across. I expected this porting process between telephone companies to be a horrible process, fraught with stuff-ups where I would probably lose access to my phone for a day or so, and maybe even my number, but I HAD to get Siri working, it's just that cool.

So I was surprised to wake up at 7am today, and find that my phone was reporting "no signal". They can't have done my porting already? can they. To my delight, I put my XT sim into my phone, and found that it was connected with Telecom XT. Even more impressive, was the fact that at my house, I now had FULL signal strength, where I had previously only had one bar. And EVEN more impressive, was that I started surfing around on the Internet on my phone for an hour or so, before I realized that I wasn't connected to my Wifi network, but to Telecom XT. Using data on Vodafone is workable, but it's often slow and Facebook needs to be refreshed, shut down the app etc. On XT, the speeds are just incredible - I highly recommend the switch if you are a power smart phone user. The XT network is 3G ONLY, so there is never a time when you're on GPRS or no data or some slow speed connection.

Even nicer, I found a plan on Telecom for $120 a month that gives me 3Gb of data (not one), 5 times as many txt messages (2,500 not 500), and about double the calling that I have been making on Vodafone. and my bill is now a fixed $120 a month, instead of a variable $400 a month. Thank you Telecom XT!

The only issue I had, was that all my contacts no longer seemed to recognize the names in my address book. (see picture) If I looked at my phone, all my txt messages were now just numbers, despite the fact that the contacts were still there. Initially, I thought my exchange account must have been deleted, but upon calling a friend, I found that this is a bug. To solve the issue, you simply need to connect your iPhone to iTunes and download a carrier update, which fixes the issue with Telecom sending through spaces in the phone numbers, and the iPhone not recognizing the numbers.

**I am not, and have never been a Telecom hater, I just call things as I see them. I think Telecom is a great company, with a marketing department that doesn't always do them justice.