No smiles at cost of sending snapshots

SOUNDING OFF: Ripped off? Stunned by good value? Write, blog or text your experience to us

Richard Nevin wrote to us after being horrified at the price attached to send a photograph with his mobile phone. At the end of September he took a picture using his mobile and decided to e-mail it to himself, more as an experiment than anything else as he had only recently discovered his phone had the ability to perform this particular function. A couple of days later he realised that the credit left on his phone was a lot lower than he thought and when he checked his O2 account online he realised his had been charged €11.32 to send the picture to himself.

It turned out that he had sent it twice, the second time in error, but he still believes a cost of €5.66 per picture is ridiculous.

When he contacted O2's customer care he was told that the price structure was clearly outlined in the terms and conditions and was "1 cent per kb or something similar. I explained that this meant nothing to me and that the price was excessive by any standard. I asked for a refund and needless to say got nowhere."

He says that while he accepts that the company does publish its prices, to "a non-technical person like me they are meaningless".

He has also written to ComReg asking if they can get him a refund and if they can get O2 to tell people how much it costs to send a picture.

Well, we were also surprised that sending a picture taken on his phone would cost that much so we contacted the company to find out more. A spokeswoman said that our reader had opted to e-mail the picture from his phone rather than sending it via multimedia messaging (MMS) which would have been significantly cheaper - instead of costing over €5 it would have cost him just 25 cent.

When pictures are sent via MMS much of the information is stripped out, reducing the file size and the cost significantly.

She accepted that our reader was not aware of any distinction between sending via e-mail and MMS. She said these were "very exceptional circumstances" and that the vast majority of multimedia messages - 95 per cent in fact - go from phone to phone with only a very small number of people using their handset's e-mail settings to send pictures to e-mail addresses. She said that she had contacted our reader and explained the most cost-effective ways to send pictures and agreed to reimburse the cost of the original message.

The best a man can get?

John Buckley sent us a mail asking what the story was with Gillette razor blades. "They don't last as long as they used to and are getting more expensive," he writes.

While we don't know if they last as long as they used to, we do know that the last blade in the packet always lasts a whole lot longer than the first one. As to the high price, we have spoken to Gillette about this in the past and they have always robustly defended the cost in Ireland, saying that the technology behind the blades is, er, cutting edge, and the quality second to none. That still doesn't explain, however, why Gillette blades cost twice and sometimes three times more in the Republic of Ireland than they do in the US.