Yesterday I buckled down and got a new cell phone subscription. I have been a loyal customer of T-mobile for the past seven years. The only effect this loyalty has had was to give them an effective carte blanche to screw me over. Their philosophy probably is that if your customer is too lazy to switch, you’ve got to incentivize them.

I identified Orange as being a lesser evil and took the cheapest one year plan from them I could get. I’ll pay €7,50/month which will be effectively doubled and all my actions will be substracted from that €15.

The customer service at the orange shop was of course dismal. This wasn’t in their flagship store but in their tiny retail outlet in Delft city centre.
They had no clue what HSDPA is and couldn’t tell me if and when Orange is planning to roll it out (Orange hasn’t released anything about this yet). They also couldn’t inform me about the availability of the Nokia N95.

I never want to be tied to a mobile operator for longer than a year. Usually I forget to cancel on time because every operator imposes a three month cancellation period so that means I’m stuck longer. They do everything to tie you down and squeeze the most possible money from you.
This time I am going to cancel my plan immediately. It would be nice if they would have offered that service in the shop.

My 3310 —proclaimed by some to be the greatest phone ever made— is not really cutting it anymore in this age of GMail apps and Jaiku presence. This means I’m looking to get a new phone.

N95

The N95 though very expensive looks like the mobile phone to get (look at the review on YouTube). But reading the review at GigaOM shows that it is everything but that battery life isn’t.

Builtin WiFi is nice to escape data costs when you are at home and at work. But the things I would be going for mostly are the excellent photo/video capabilities and the media features.
I’m looking for a pocket camera and combining it with a cell phone would seem to be the best utilization of pocket space. For unobtrusive shooting and shooting e.g. while sporting or going out a 1kg DSLR is too obtrusive. The N95’s GPS would mean that pictures could be automatically geotagged. It does all this and more.

The N95 is simply too expensive and the next runnerup candidate is the N73.

Rabo Mobiel

The other thing I had been considering is to take a mobile plan from Dutch bank the Rabobank called Rabo Mobiel. Rabobank has recently been offering very affordable mobile plans to its customers with the promise of digital mobile payment options for the future.

Payment possibilities here in the Netherlands are in the dark ages compared to the far east or even with the Nordic countries. I’m guessing that uptake will take a while but Rabobank are trying to get people on board with very competitive pricing (appealing to the Dutch) and a very well done advertising campaign.

This offering is cost efficient, sympathethic and promises to bring you to the future of payment. Still I didn’t take it because seeing is believing and switching banks is nontrivial.

See the introductory ad: