OMG has summer arrived in Perth (now to be forever referred to as Hell), we are in the grip of a heat wave with temperatures during the day at 40C+ degrees, and looking like being there for a week. Our nighttime temperatures are 24-26C degrees, sleep is just poor let me tell you.
We’ve still got months of summer left to go too, kill me now!! My world for all-year winter!
Filed under: Travel | Tags: customer service, out of pocket expenses, poor service, refund, virgin Australia
Back on October 30th when I returned to Australia from my Canada holiday I flew in just as Qantas CEO Alan Joyce decided to ground his entire fleet worldwide. I wasn’t flying Qantas this one time, I usually do, but this time was on competitor VAustalia and Virgin Australia. VAustralia had returned me to Brisbane so late that I wasn’t able to make my Virgin Australia connecting flight to Perth and the nightmare ensued, Qantas passengers had taken all the seats for the next several days and it was be four days before I’d fly out, I was given a ticket and sent away. Little did I know at the time, because I had been pulled out of the service queue by a not so friendly staff member to be assisted, I should have been given accommodation. So I booked and paid for accommodation and taxis there and back, about $600 out of pocket, which I later wrote to Virgin Australia seeking compensation for.
In December I finally got a reply from Virgin Australia’s customer support team apologising for the problems and agreeing to refund my expenses, just email us with the bank details and quote the reference number and attention to this person’s name. I did this immediately on December 8th, and got an auto reply from them to say they were busy and there may be a delay, fine, but I did expect they’d look at it. So, I have been checking my bank periodically for a deposit by them, a month later and still nothing in the account. Annoyed, I wrote again to the same person yesterday forwarding the original email and enquiring when I might receive my refund. It is just so annoying that I am still out of pocket several months after this all happened, and all because this airline had a turn around on its flight times that didn’t allow for anything going wrong, as did happen on this occasion (delays leaving LAX of 40+ minutes).
I have no intentions of ever flying this airline ever again. Rude staff, poor service, poor customer service, not worth the hassles. Wish I’d never gone with them in the first place and had stuck with Cathay Pacific despite their 2am departure time from Vancouver.
Filed under: Computing, internet | Tags: android, samsung galaxy tab 10.1, tablet, underwhelming
Earlier this year my sister was given a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 by her employer as a result of winning a competition in sales performance at work, her employer was all set to sell the device here in Australia, then of course Apple in Australia sued to prevent its sale, and this went on for many months until recently in December that was overturned and Samsung was again allowed to begin selling the device. As my sister and I live on opposite sides of the country I only just got to see the tablet on Christmas day, and I have to say as an iPad 2 user I was not a fan.
My father was also with me, he has Samsung’s Galaxy S2 mobile phone, also an Android device, and he was excited to see what the device was like, he got playing with it first and was getting confused straight await, this from someone who was already an Android user and used to how things work on his own device. To me that doesn’t bode well if existing Android users get confused, what if non-Android users come to purchase this device, what is their experience likely to be. So, I got on and had a play.
The familiar animated backgrounds were there, Ainslie had the aquarium animated background running, I have to say it was rather pleasing to look at, and it adapted to whether you ran it in portrait or landscape mode, although it would be a nice tough if the fishes swam to adjust to the change of orientation, but that’s just a nicety not a necessity as happened to be the case. Launching of apps was the usual tough the icon and it launched, and closing was a matter of touching the little home icon on the corner of the screen, strangely no button. I found after using dad’s phone that it was very weird not having the familiar settings, home and back buttons in the bezel area to use, they were instead on the screen area. I launched the web browser to browse the web, the first thing I noticed here was the terrible scrolling here, it was awfully jerky here, something I came to notice in every application when dragging content, clearly the device must have been underpowered in either/both its cpu/gpu.
Another thing I found highly confusing was how I was to remove inactive programs from memory, on dad’s phone this is easily found, and they were easily removed, on the tablet I couldn’t easily find this and gave up. Settings on the device were found by holding my finger down over a clear area of the screen until a new window appeared, I have to assume that this is documented for users and in the box when they buy it as it is just not obvious to the uninitiated user, I much prefer the phone’s settings button, far nicer method. The user interface of the Tab 10.1 is just crap, the pseudo 3D interface that Android provides is a pathetic joke, I’ve never truly understood this need to have a 3D environment, but if you’re going to offer one, offer a decent attempt, not this.
I have to say I will be amazed if this device sells terribly well in its current form. I don’t know anything about how Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) release modifies things for tablets, and how it might affect this device, but it can but improve things from where they stand right now, the experience really is sub-par when compared to what I am used to on my iPad 2.
