Meteor Unlimited Data

I'm on Meteor's Bill Pay Lite - €10 / month - one month rolling contract.
I also have an add-on for €5 / month - 250Mb data. Which I've been very happy with, but I'm about to start going over (and you never want to do that with a mobile), plus limit-watching takes all the fun out of watching YouTube on a bus.

So I want to switch to their unlimited data add-on (for meteor unlimited means 10Gb / month) - for €15 / month. Would prefer if there was a €10 / month - 1Gb option to ease myself in, but there isn't.

Anyway tried the online site, no dice - error some code or other. So I rang customer support. They said ok, waited. Then they came back and said "sorry, checked with our managers, you can't get that on your tariff".

Oh really, not according to your web-site.



They went off and checked and said yes I should be able to get it, then they tried to get a technician to force it through. It didn't work. So now they'll have to get back to me next week (I'd been on the call now for about 20 minutes at this stage). So they have credited my account with €5 for my trouble - nice save, customer service! Hopefully, it'll all work out soon.

Meteor new EU Roaming Rates

From EU Announcement in Irish Times

• Making call - 39c ex VAT / Meteor quote it 47c (incl VAT) - matches
  
• Receiving call - 15c ex VAT / Meteor quote it 18c (incl VAT) - matches
• Sending Text - 11c ex VAT / Meteor quote it 13C (incl VAT) - matches
• Receiving text free
  
• Data - Maximum wholesale rate per MB (megabyte) - €0.80 / Meteor quote it €10.24 (inc VAT)- WTF!!!
  

I know that a wholesale rate isn't the same things as a consumer rate, but greater than 12x discrepancy?

The EU should be applauded for doing this, but after setting max consumer rates for texts and voice, they should also set a maximum consumer rate on data roaming rates.

Also - according to their site they are still operating an opt-in on roaming broadband cap (€60). No opt-in should be necessary, the cap should be applied by default - see New EU Rules

See : Meteor - Roaming with Meteor

Android 2.1 on Acer Liquid

Acer Liquid E is due out about now, which is basically the Acer Liquid with Android 2.1 (instead of the 1.6 Donut).

The clever pixies o the net have leaked the new ROM early.

You can easily install by simply installing the above bin using the Acer Flashing Tool. That's it, there is no step 2. Changes re Donut are incremental - everything is just nicer.

• nicer keyborard
• nicer transitions
• nicer browsing
  
• mutliple google accounts

Full instruction on how to do this including a YouTube video (and how to ROOT your phone - if your so inclined) at unlockr

Aer Lingus Flight Information - expected delays are coming up as on time

Aer Lingus - Flight Arrivals/Departures.

If you don't have a volcano-based airline delay story, your simply not cool. Aer Lingus aren't helping though. Their site consistently says outgoing (non-cancelled) flights are on time. Particularly for outgoing US flights. But US Flights are experiencing long delays - due to re-routing round the ash-cloud and extra maintenance. So you can see this with a flight that is coming from US say with a 2 hour delay. It's next outgoing Irish flght will say ontime, despite the fact that it will arrive 2 hours later meaning zero turnaround time. This happened to me on Monday. I checked their site today at various points and it happened again, and checking the current outgoing US flight EI124 - it's again 2 hours late, but the site says that tomorrows Irish departure EI125 is ontime - so expect it to happen tomorrow again.

So the bottom line is their flight information is only useful for cancelled flights.

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Google Maps Navigation for UK and Ireland

So now turn-by-turn navigation is now supported on Android outside the US for UK and Ireland - and yes it works in the Republic. So I was interested to try it out. For some reason I couldn't get it on the Marketplace - could be an Acer Liquid build thing. So I found package on Android Freeware and manually installed it.

I wanted to try it out immediately, but I cycle to work, rather than drive, so I came up with a plan. I'd connect a set of headphones to the phone and I could at least check out the voice navigation while I cycled, you know "turn left in 200 meters" that sort of thing.

Now there was just one problem: I like to listen to music when I cycle. I know, not terribly sensible, but a lot of fun. Could I do both? Thanks to Android's multi-tasking I was able listen to some sounds with the occational navigation voice-over giving me directions. Sick!

That's right 1 meeelyon servers - mwahahahahaha

Google's Insane Number of Servers Visualized - Servers - Gizmodo