Readers' forum have your say

The iPhone that wouldn’t make calls

A reader contacted us on behalf of her dad who bought an iPhone 4 from Vodafone in October last. Since then, he has had nothing but problems. “He uses the phone for his business and since he bought it, he gets at least 10 ‘call failed’ messages every day. The shop sent it to be repaired but then he got the phone back a few days later, the same problems were there. He brought it back again, they sent it off and once again he had the same problem.”

The phone was replaced but he had the same problems with the new one and the company repeated the steps as before – and the same problems happened.

“Then we got onto Apple directly and they said he could send the phone back to be replaced and just pay €29 for the courier,” she writes. “He did this and has the same problems again. Apple customer care claim it’s a Vodafone problem. Vodafone is saying it is an Apple problem,” she says.

At this stage, her dad wants to leave Vodafone. “He has 10 months left in his contract and we have been told they will get an account manager to ring us back to discuss closing the account and go through their termination charges. I told them that we should not be obliged to pay any charges as they cannot provide the service.

“He is so frustrated he is willing to just pay the money to get out, but if he can avoid it, well obviously that would be better.” We contacted the company which then contacted our reader’s father. Vodafone has now agreed to send him an iPhone 3 to keep him going and whenever the iPhone 5 comes out – probably in the autumn – it said it would supply him with one at no extra charge.

I have also pressed them for an explanation for the actual problem which may or may not be forthcoming.

Readers get around Kindle delivery issues

Recently we carried a query from a reader who was unable to buy a Kindle e-reader from amazon.co.uk and instead was referred to the US site which meant that the purchase incurred excise and VAT charges as well as higher delivery charges.

We asked the company why Irish would-be e-readers could not buy from our closest neighbour and got a less than illuminating response from the company.

All it said was that: “Irish customers should visit amazon.com to purchase a Kindle. This is currently the best way to get Kindles to customers in Ireland. In the future, we hope to distribute Kindles from all of our fulfilment centres, but we haven’t announced a timeline for that at this stage.”

In the absence of a clearer answer from the company – we did ask again after receiving this response – readers have been suggesting some reasons. John Murphy said he thought the issue is “not related to delivery logistics, but has something to do with the distribution licences that Amazon hold with the publishers in relation to where they can distribute books to.” He said it was “not an issue with printed books, but from what I know, Amazon are still figuring out deals with publishers in relation to the distribution of electronic books and I think this is the primary reason why Irish customers have to purchase the Kindle from the US site.

“The issue is also related to the customer’s account. If they have a UK credit card and billing address, then they are free to purchase the Kindle and e-books from the .co.uk website, but other than that, all orders from Ireland have to be placed through the US website.”

The suitably named Mary Reade, meanwhile, had another theory and a workaround. She is “the happy owner of two Kindles” – an original and a newer 3G one and I bought both through ebay.co.uk. “There are those selling on Ebay in UK that won’t ship to Ireland but most people know someone in the UK or Northern Ireland who will re-post it to Ireland. Amazon UK won’t sell outside the UK because of customs/duty/ paperwork – all international sales (for countries without a ‘local’ Amazon site) go through the US site and they add on the VAT etc so that the delivery company doesn’t have the issue of trying to collect duty from people who didn’t realise it would be payable. Having bought on Ebay, it is simple to register the device on Amazon. You can buy either brand new or unwanted, slightly used devices.”