READERS' FORUM:Have your say

A reader from Skerries bought an Apple iPhone 4 three months ago and was initially quite happy with his purchase. Last month, however, it began to act up. It started shutting down at random intervals and needed a full reboot – done by holding down the front and top on/off buttons together – before it would get going again.

“The problem seems to occur only when it is running on battery power and not when plugged in. The battery is fully charged and there are no other obvious problems.” He did some research on the web and tried a number of solutions but nothing worked. “I spoke to an Apple customer service rep who said that it sounded like a malfunction and that my phone needed to be replaced. Following Apple procedure, I received an empty UPS package three days later and sent my phone to the UK on December 3rd. A week later, it was returned with the message that they had been unable to replicate my problem and judged the phone to be in full working order. If the problem reoccurred, I was told to contact customer service again.”

The problem did reoccur, so he contacted Apple who “argued quite strongly” that the problem lay with an app on his phone and not the phone itself. “I was told I would have to isolate which app was causing the problem. To do this I had to restore my phone to its factory settings and use the phone without apps for three days. If it then worked without malfunction, I was to introduce one app per day until they were all reintroduced safely. I explained that this solution seemed to be unfairly weighted on the customer since I bought, or downloaded, all my apps in good faith from the Apple store with the expectation that they would not have such a serious effect on my phone.”

He did what they said but the problem remained and his phone continued to malfunction. “It is now 16 days since I reported the malfunction to Apple. I was without a phone for seven of those days as it was with Apple in the UK. It has not functioned properly on any of the other days. It still doesn’t work properly and I am faced with fighting with Apple to have it replaced.”

The story took a twist after our reader first contacted us. He was in Belfast where he “stumbled upon an Apple Genius Bar. They took one look at my phone, declared it broken and promptly replaced it. The funny thing is that during the very first call I made about this, they checked if there were any Apple shops in Ireland and said no. Belfast being in the UK of course. Classic case of computer says no.”

We contacted the company, which promised to get back to us with an explanation, but they didn’t.

Not so juicy at Tesco

Leo Gibson was very annoyed by a price change in Tesco recently. “They have been selling their own brand of freshly squeezed orange juice for €1.45 to €1.48 for some time. They have now increased the price to €1.99, a 33 per cent increase,” he writes. “As if that was not bad enough, they also have a special offer of three for a fiver. Now that special offer means they want you to pay 17 cent more but you have to buy three to get the offer.”

Sky high data roaming

James Hill was in Australia recently and switched on the data roaming facility on his phone on four consecutive days to check his e-mail.

“I was very conscious of the cost so immediately switched it off once I had checked.” On the journey out, while he was in transit in Heathrow, he received a text from O2 saying: “the cost of using mobile internet abroad – note the term ‘abroad’ – was €4.96 per mb and a one-page download cost 24c. My interpretation of this was that if I checked my e-mails, based on the fact that I only receive a few per day, and at 24c per page, it would not break the bank.”

When he checked his bill he was horrified to discover he had been charged €3.27, €7.06, €23.83 (for 2.91mb) and €24.58 (3mb) “on the four consecutive days, for 2 or 3 minutes at a time, to check the contents of my in-box, for what was mostly spam. I was charged the Australian/New Zealand rate of €9.95 per mb as distinct from the ‘abroad’ rate quoted in the text message. The response from 02 was that they would refund half the charge because of the issue regarding the misleading text message, having argued about the meaning of the word abroad. Data roaming while abroad is a very costly business. The alternative is a cup of coffee in McDonalds and all the free wi-fi one could want!”