Google Voice is one of Google’s latest endeavors. Their philosophy is not one phone number per device, but rather one phone number per person. It’s an amazing philosophy and the results are pretty damn impressive! Google Voice is currently a private beta and is invitation only. An invitation is also rather hard to obtain for those of us without friends already using Google Voice. I emailed a few of mine and a couple hours later, I was the proud recipient of a Google Voice invitation! I signed up and decided to give it a whirl.

Currently, in terms of phone services, I have a home phone number (powered by Vonage) as well as a cellular device, the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 with AT&T as the service provider. I love the fact that Vonage emails me transcriptions of my voice messages and allows me to listen to them from the web-based interface. Unfortunately, AT&T does not. This means that my voice messages are in two different places and makes things much harder to look for. My main reason for looking into Google Voice was so that I could get all of my messages transcribed and emailed to me. It makes life much easier when all of your messages come to one inbox!

As part of the Google Voice signup process, I had to choose my new “Google Number”, effectively this is just a standard phone number powered by Google Voice! Here’s the cool part, it allows me to have free national calling as well as extremely low rates to most countries. Not quite as low as Vonage but still much lower than AT&T! The beauty of it is that whenever anyone calls my new Google Number, it will automatically ring both my Vonage phone and my Xperia X1 and whichever one I answer with will take the call. Of course, there is a boatload of other features that Google Voice offers as well and all of them are truly amazing solutions! Best of all Google Voice is free! You can view the full feature list here.

After looking through Google Voice and all of it’s features it seems that Google has the infrastructure set up to successfully replace my phone company. Unfortunately for them, they were unable to buy the airwave space that they required in order to become a cellular phone company. For now however, I don’t see Google Voice replacing my phone companies but rather working along with them to add features and functionality at low cost. In the future, however, I could definitely see Google replacing my phone company with Google Voice and I would guess that they would do a brilliant job at it. I for one would be willing to pay Google for the service, though I do prefer free over fee any day.

For a beta product, Google Voice certainly is a very impressive service. It’s something you notice with Google a lot. All of their products that are considered beta or even pre-alpha are very good quality. Honestly speaking their beta products are a lot of time better than paid products from other companies! In fact, I’m writing this from Google Chrome for Linux unstable on Ubuntu 9.04. That means pre-alpha stage. Guess what? In the two months that I’ve been using it, the only thing it can’t do is print successfully — something that Google warned me about before I installed Chrome for Linux. It’s something I do rarely as it is and if I ever do need to print, it doesn’t take too much effort to fire up Mozilla Firefox and print from there.

In regards to the many subdomains of http://rohan-kapoor.com, currently they are going to stay at http://rohan-kapoor.com though at some point I will transition them over to http://rohankapoor.com. The old addresses will be seamlessly redirected with 301 Redirects which should cause no problems to the end users!

It’s good to finally be moving everything to the http://rohankapoor.com domain name! It seems more professional, you know?

Ubuntu is an African word meaning ‘Humanity to others’, or ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.

The Ubuntu team has really done a great job here. From every release of Ubuntu, they have been true to the official Ubuntu philosophy. The free price tag doesn’t hurt either!

Anyways, I’m downloading 9.10 Desktop from the torrent and right now, it’s taken about 10 minutes and is already 75% done. Here’s the link to the torrent!

I’ll probably end up running an install or an upgrade by this weekend, and then I’ll be sure to let all of you guys know, how it is!!

Stay tuned for more about Ubuntu 9.10 | Karmic Koala!

Part 1: Tales of a Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1

Part 2:  Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1… The Plot Thickens

Part 3: Conclusion to My Sony Ericsson XPERIA Repair Woes (this post)

Early last week, I received a phone call from a senior member of Sony Ericsson’s Social Media Department named Jeff. This had been his second attempt to contact me but I had unable to receive to his call.

I’d like to begin with saying that I’ve really appreciated that Jeff gave me a call. It says a lot about a company if they are spending money working on their image as seen by consumers and trying to help those who have had bad experiences. It seems Sony Ericsson as a company hasn’t declined as badly as I had originally thought. It seems that they may have just a few service representatives that may have lacked the style and enthusiam that normally accompanies any experience with Sony Ericsson. I’ve quite happy to report that Jeff did have that enthusiasm and from the hour that we spent discussing, it would be safe to say that Sony Ericsson as a company still cares about their consumers, even through this economic decline.

Jeff told me that he had seen my previous two blog posts regarding my issues with the XPERIA X1. He was quite happy to explain the Sony Ericsson’s point of view regarding the problems I reported. To his and Sony Ericsson’s credit, he accepted that they had made several mistakes throughout my support experience and he was very apolegetic about it, though he personally hadn’t done anything to contribute to it. His call has gone a long way towards making me feel good about this Sony Ericcson experience, and now I probably would consider staying with Sony Ericcsoon XPERIA as my smartphone provider of choice.

I began the conversation asking Jeff what the original problem was with the XPERIA X1 that I sent in for repair. He was quick to inform me that while he didn’t have all the information (those records have kept at the repair center) he did no that it wasn’t user error or anything that I did. It was in fact a problem with the hardware of the device.

Additionally, I had a large problem with the issues of the support card. Jeff was happy to clear that up for me. It seems that the other reviews were mistaken. Not all, XPERIA X1s are shipped out with the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 Support Card. Especially the ones in Singapore. It depends on the ammount of support offered in the region. In Singapore, only basic support is offerred and as such the XPERIA X1’s sold there are not shipped out with a support card.

What’s even more interesting is that the support card doesn’t make a difference in problems such as mine. I would still have had to pay shipping & handling as the support card is irrelevant in these cases. Of course this means that the original representative that I spoke with was not properly trained and gave me incorrect information. You also can’t be mad at a company for a mistake that 1 employee could have accidently made.

My next issue was regarding the long time that it took for them to inform me the status of my X1 and to then ship it out. Jeff explained that the repair center that I had shipped my phone to didn’t have as many X1’s as they realized they needed. They just had to wait till they could more shipped out to them.

My final problem(s) with this support experience was for the long time it took Sony Ericcson Support staff to get me a UPS tracking number. It took them a week from my first call to provide me with this information and that wait wasn’t appreciated… At all. Jeff said he understood how I felt and then he accepted all responsibility for this error on behalf of Sony Ericsson. As he explained it to me, what essentially happened was that the repair center called Sony Ericsson telling them a replace was needed. Sony Ericsson then called me telling me a replace was needed should they go ahead? Sony Ericsson then called repair center telling them to go ahead and ship it the next day. The next day, the repair center should have called back and given Sony Ericsson a tracking number. However they did not and as such I was not given the needed information.

In conclusion, I’m still unhappy with some of the problems that happened during my XPERIA X1’s repair service and I’m still somewhat disappointed with Sony Ericsson for their mistakes in handling this case. However, Jeff’s phone call and resulting discussion has lessened the blow for me and it is likely that I would at least consider, if not buy, another smartphone from Sony Ericsson.

Stay tuned for my Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 Review!

Part 2:  Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1… The Plot Thickens (this post)

Part 3: Conclusion to My Sony Ericsson XPERIA Repair Woes

Around an hour ago, I posted Tales Of A Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1. Since then I’ve already received one comment from Michaela Conley. I also have finished having another conversation with Sony Ericsson that has only proved how not helpful their customer service department is.

After waiting for about 30 seconds, a sales representative picks up the phone and then attempts to find my information in her computer. She tells me that there is no records of Rohan Kapoor with my phone number. I ask her to try again and oddly enough there pop-ups the records relating to this problem. After explaining the situation to her, she informs me that there is still no change in the status and that the representative who told me I would receive the XPERIA X1 today was mistaken and the true policy is 3-5 business days, not 3 business days. After I requested more information from her, she put me on hold for several minutes while she attempted to find the information. After returning from placing me hold, she informed me that the computer had no records indicating shipped or not shipped status and as such couldn’t help me. Furthermore, she informed me that the person responsible for this data was not in today. She however told me that she is bringing this up to her supervisor’s attention and said that within the next 24-48 hours, I should have an email with up to date information.

As I have mentioned multiple times already. the quality of Sony Ericsson’s support has seriously declined within the last 2 months. If it is taking them this long to figure out whether they have shipped out a replacement or not is a little scary. It makes you wonder what they are actually doing if they can’t readily provide this information to a customer, especially one, who paid this large a sum for their best phone.

As I said in my comment response to Michaela Conley,

At this point, Sony Ericsson will have to do a lot to make up for this injustice towards me as an XPERIA Owner, or I may end up taking my business somewhere else!

Part 2:  Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1… The Plot Thickens

Part 3: Conclusion to My Sony Ericsson XPERIA Repair Woes

As some of you may (or may not) know, I recently purchased a Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1, their top-of-the-line phone running Windows Mobile version 6.1 Professional. This phone is sold with two versions the X1a for sale within North America and the X1i for sale within the rest of the world. As it is much cheaper to purchase an X1i within the United States if bought through a third party on eBay (for example), there is nearly a $500 price difference. I decided to buy the X1i for that reason as I wan’t ready to spend $1000 on a cellphone (I spent less on my laptop) and therefore bought the X1i from eBay for $600 (about) United States Dollars. This purchase was completed nearly two months ago.

For unimportant reasons, the X1 spent most of those two months in it’s box unopened. I only got around to opening the box of the X1 three weeks ago. In the beginning it seemed like a flawless handset but within the first 24 hours problems began to appear. First the volume down button stopped working. Then multiple buttons on the slide-out keyboard began to malfunction until finally at least 8 of them stopped responding at all. After a call with a Sony Ericsson XPERIA Support Technician, I was told that I should hard-reset the phone. An action that totally wipes all data from the device and see if that would bring the keys functionality back. However it didn’t. All it did was manage to irritate me more because now I had no data on the device (I had backups that were recent but would have to be restored) and the keys still didn’t work. The Sony Ericsson representative was shocked that this hadn’t fixed my problem.

The standard protocol for the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 (being Sony Ericsson’s Top of The Line Business Phone) is that any problems with the device, a new one will be shipped out and should be received within 48 hours. As the Sony Ericsson representative was quick to inform me, that only applies if you have a support card. And the sad part is, the seller on eBay informs me that he wasn’t sent any support cards from Sony Ericsson. After refusing to send me out a temporary replacement, another hour is spent on the phone while the representative sets up an RMA. To add insult to this injury, he then informs me that the repair/replace process can take anywhere from 7-14 days after the device is received. Additionally, he tells me that I will need to pay to ship the item to their repair center.

All this because I don’t have a support card?

Doesn’t sound very fair, does it? Had I had a support card, the representative was quick to inform me, they would have immediately sent out a new phone and covered shipping both ways. I don’t see why I should be treated any differently than a customer with a support card. I paid the same ammount of money as anyone who bought the phone with a support card. I have a full warranty as well! Why should I be treated any differently because I don’t have a slip of paper that states SUPPORT CARD on it?

So I paid my shipping charges, and sent my XPERIA X1 on it’s way to Sony Ericsson’s Product Repair Center. About 5 days after I shipped it to them, I got a phone call from another one of their representatives who wished to give me a status update. First, he tells me that my XPERIA X1 is not repairable. He then offers me a choice to accept a brand new XPERIA X1a or get my broken XPERIA X1i back. After comparing the two, I decided I would accept the XPERIA X1a. The representative then informed me that I should receive my new XPERIA X1a by next Wednesday (today). He also informed me that he would be

unable to give [me] a support card, as we [Sony Ericsson Support] don’t carry them in stock.

Effectively, that means that if there are any more problems with the new device, I will have to pay shipping and then wait a long time again. For someone who has spent almost $600 buying one of these new, that doesn’t seem fair at all. It’s also not something I expect from Sony Ericsson, a company whose support department has been exceptional in all my dealings with them before. Seems that they too, are no longer able to provide the exceptional support that they have provided in the past.

Yesterday, I decided to check with Sony Ericsson, to see if they could provide me with a tracking number so that I could verify when my new X1a would be arriving. The representative I spoke with said that,

There is no change in the account status. As far as I can tell, your X1a hasn’t even been shipped yet.

Obviously this sounds a little fishy, as I had been told it would be shipped last friday, four business days ago. The representative then told me, it would be best if I waited till tomorrow (today) and then called back for a status update. As it’s allready 5:30 PM on Wednesday (past UPS delivary time), I think I will go ahead and call them now and see what they have to say.

Overall, I am quite disappointed with the XPERIA X1 so far and even more disappointed with the level of support I have received from Sony Ericsson. They used to be one of the best companies in the industry, however at this point, I’m not sure if I will be buying another device from them. I’m that badly shaken up and dissapointed.

I’ll try to update this with more information as soon as I have it.

You can view part two of this post here

A quick google and look what I found: http://geekozoid.blogspot.com/2008/06/number-pad-numeric-keypad-not-working.html

Basically you need to:

Click on System->Preferences->Keyboard
Open Mouse Keystab.
Uncheck “Allow to control the pointer using the keyboard”

and then it works perfectly! Thanks GeekoZoid!

It appears that it took me long enough to pull it together, but hey, I was busy. Anways better late then never.

The homepage for WordPress/MU Favicon is here.

And for anyone interested, here is the changelog:

You can view the plugin page here. Or download directly from the WordPress Plugin Repository here.

Currently version 3.0 is the most stable version with no bugs that I know of!

Enjoy