Last Friday I had my Harley serviced in Oxford. I booked it in for first thing in the morning and was going to wait while they did it which they estimated at 2 to 3 hours.

So I thought I would put my new Sony UX180P to the test and took it along so I could catch up on some forum and blog reading while I was waiting. The only thing that put me off was the cost. Data costs via a GPRS network tend to be expensive unless you have a special plan which I don’t and could cost anything between £3.00 to £5.00 per megabyte depending on the network.

Luckily I stumbled across an offer which Orange was doing where on pay as you go you can get unlimited internet access for £1.00 for a whole day. Now the unlimited access is if you are using their GPRS or CSD but it turns out they are also doing a special offer for 3G data access for £1.00 a day as well albeit limited to 25 megabytes which would have been ample for me. Strictly speaking on the 3G data access you aren’t supposed to use it for modem access for computers.

Anyway, when I went to order my Orange World Daily Access for a £1 it didn’t actually give an option for GPRS or 3G. When I connected my PC through the built in 3G modem it connected to the 3G network by default rather than the GPRS network so I was happily surfing away at thoroughly useable speeds. The battery in the Sony UX180P lasted just long enough for them to carry out the service which was good as at least it drew my attention away from all the goodies and new bikes that they had there and temptation couldn’t prevail.

Posted in Gadgets, Internet