Lumia 800: Vodafone (18th May 2012)
Mum uses Vodafone Family to get unlimited talktime with us for £5 a month. Not sure what contract she’s on so can’t say if it actually works out cheaper. Adding it to my own contract wouldn’t work out, for sure, as I rarely use my phone for talking. Talking, on a phone? That was so 20th Century.
Inserting The SIM
- Eventually found the SIM in the plain cardboard box from Phones 4U, in a little plastic wallet with a red card.
- I probably missed this due to it looking like a special offer flyer. A case of physical Banner Blindness?
- The tabs and flaps at the top of the Lumia 800 now have little numbered labels to explain how they work.
- Snapping the Micro-SIM out of it’s card was seriously nerve-racking. It’s a very audible snapping sound!
- Loaded it into the phone using the pull-out tray.
- Bit confused which side it loaded into so had to RTFM about that.
Transfer My Number
Surely everyone would want to do this? As usual, Vodafone’s site is broken and stupid. It seems the online form for transferring numbers has been broken since 2011.
After quite some time in their ugly search results I found a Keep my number page. But the only links are to e-mail them are the bottom of the entry, offering merely to contact the Customer Services team.
Oh, wait, silly me. That bullet list in the middle? The one where the text is identically styled to normal paragraph text? Yeah, those are links. WHAT?!
Happily it includes a link to Keep your pay as you go number when you move to pay monthly. That’s exactly what I want and at least this form exists. Struggled to find my Vodafone Account Number until I noticed a new introductory e-mail from Vodafone on my latop, which had it.
Weirdly it insisted on both a Town and a County, even though I live in London. London acts as either the town or the county for many addresses here. So I just repeated it in both boxes.
When the form submitted, I got a confirmation page saying the older number was going to be replaced and the new number was going to be “brought in”. It says this will happen on Tuesday 22nd May 2012.
It Worked (22nd May 2012)
Somewhen between 3pm and 5pm today my number switched over. Yay!
Mission Complete (25nd May 2012)
No problems since switching, although billing for the first month is sneakily and complicated.
Mobile Data Not Working (2nd June 2012)
Since I got the phone mobile data hasn’t worked. Today I double-checked Vodafone’s mobile data settings for the Lumia 800 and they are all correct.
So after reading several long and angry threads, mostly by USA customers, it seems the phone gets these settings from the SIM when the phone is first turned on. I hadn’t installed the SIM at that time, since my phone turned itself on while I was giving it the 14-hour first charge recommended by Phones 4U.
So I tried using the Nokia Network Setup app. It found a bunch of providers:
- vodafone UK Prepaid
- vodafone UK
- ASDA Mobile
- Lebara
- Talk Talk
- BT
- Talkmobile
- Talkmobile Prepaid
As I’m on a Vodafone Pay Monthly contract for 24 months, I figured the first option was correct. And that was already selected. Well, I pushed it again to be sure.
Then I noticed the + icon at the bottom:
- I pushed the + icon.
- This displayed an add screen.
- Tried setting the Connection name to Vodafone Data but it was 1 character too long.
- Tried Vodafone UK and it fit.
- Ticked the box called Make this my current APN
- Below this is a section called Internet APN
- I followed the earlier instructions for setting Vodafone’s mobile data settings for the Lumia 800.
- Added the details internet, web and web.
- Below that is a section called MMS APN, which I ignored as I don’t use that feature.
- Clicked the save icon.
- This displayed a warning called NO MMS APN SETTING.
- I clicked ok to proceed.
- Nothing seemed to happen for a second, then the interminate progress animation started.
- It seemed to work, as I was taken back to the network page. At the top, it now said:
Your phone has been successfully updated with the settings for the operator below.
- There were no more confirmation buttons, so I pushed ← back to the Start screen.
The result? Still no mobile data! WHAT?! The APN settings it gave were the same as I entered from the website. There is no hidden extra thing which this app does beyond that, as far as I can tell.