Smartone-Vodafone Heartless to Its Most Loyal Customer [Updated]

From January 31 – February 14 I travelled to three US cities: New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. As you all know I am a long time iPhone user, someone who is very familiar with the Internet and various technologies. Hence, I was surprised to received a SMS from Smartone-Vodafone (SMV) on Feb. 5th, while in Los Angeles (the second city of my trip), regarding my data roaming charges exceeding HKD1400.00.

I immediately followed the instructions in the SMS and contacted SMV’s Customer Service (CS) department to determine what had went wrong. Especially when at that point, out of the 6 days I had been away from Hong Kong I spent 2 of those traveling on air planes.

Continue reading “Smartone-Vodafone Heartless to Its Most Loyal Customer [Updated]”

iPhone on Smartone-Vodafone Hong Kong [Nov. 1 Update]

I have now confirmed with Smartone-Vodafone that the Internet Browsing plan; now known as IOM plan, indeed only cover HTTP and the corresponding HTTPS traffic. So any web traffic through Mobile Safari on your iPhone and any applications; whether it is downloaded from the Apple AppStore or unauthorized 3rd party, that uses the HTTP Posts and Gets will be covered in the Internet Browsing plan.

Any POP3 traffic will be outside of the Internet Browsing plan allowance and Smartone-Vodafone has a separate POP3 Email monthly plan for HKD30/month. As a result any IMAP or Exchange Push traffic will be count as regular Data traffic. I think this omission of IMAP and Exchange traffic from the Email monthly plan is the wrong thing to do for Smartone-Vodafone. Why would anyone choose POP3 over IMAP or Exchange email is beyond me. Especially when the iPhone is only one of many devices most users will use to access their emails, and definitely not the primary device. I urge Smartone-Vodafone to listen to its customers and change their Email monthly plan.

Please see my original article, “iPhone Hacked in Hong Kong on Smartone-Vodafone” for details of my post and the feedbacks from various readers.

Smartone-Vodafone Really Doesn’t Know

Over the past 3 months in preparation of my eventual iPhone usage on the Smartone-Vodafone network, I began testing to see which is the best combination Smartone-Vodafone data plan to subscribe to.

Prior to August of this year I subscribed to Smartone-Vodafone’s “HKD118.00/month Data Plan”, which gave me 10MB of usage per month and a HKD15.00/MB thereafter. While using my Nokia E61i at the time I frequently exceeds my 10MB allocation for the plan. I also did not use the GPRS access freely due to the limit imposed by the plan. Continue reading “Smartone-Vodafone Really Doesn’t Know”

iPhone Hacked in Hong Kong on Smartone-Vodafone

Many of you know that I was in North America this past two weeks and was also in New York City.

While at NYC I spent some time at the 5th Ave. Apple Store gaining some hands on experience with the iPhone. This was the first time I saw the iPhone in person and played with its applications and Multitouch interface. I will talk more about this in a separate post.

Getting back to the topic in question. While in NYC last week much had transpired regarding the unlocking (release of the lock down of the iPhone to the AT&T carrier). End of last month iPhone SIM Free announced that they had a software to unlock the iPhone from AT&T iron fist. They said that they will be selling the software on a per user (iPhone) license within a few days. Weeks had past and no announcements. Continue reading “iPhone Hacked in Hong Kong on Smartone-Vodafone”