I'm not at all happy with Orange right now. I've been a loyal Orange customer for over 4 years, keeping the same handset for all that time and paying them £30 per month on contract. With my phone coming to the end of it's life I wanted to upgrade to the best phone I could get and keep that for (hopefully!) the next four years.

Before I go into my experience - I'd love to hear how you've faired. If you have upgrade stories (good or bad) please either blog them or add comments to this blog.

OK - my story. Popping into the Orange shop there are a wide range of phones clearly available for free on contract. My choice - the Sony Ericsson k800i.

"Sorry sir, that's only available to new customers - you can have that phone for £100." What? The phones on offer for a free upgrade were singularly uninspiring. Phoning Orange and threatenning to leave dropped the price to £89 - the best they could do. They explained that while they would like to upgrade me they had to position their offers to attract new customers.

My understanding of business is that it is much easier to keep your existing customers than to find a new one and that you should *never* neglect your existing customer base. I was until that point a happy existing customer.

Close to moving to a new provider I phoned The Car Phone Warehouse to see whether they could upgrade me for free. They could - and sticking with Orange. Yipee! I was offered a 12 or 18 month contract and was happy to sign-up for an 18 month contract, moving to the Orange Puma 30 plan. I was told I'd get 375 any-network minutes, 450 land-line minutes and 75 texts per month. Great.

First statement arrives and I have 200 any-network minuts, 100 landline minutes and 100 fixed line minutes - that is a 12 month contract. A call to Orange. "Ahh - yes sir - you're on a 12 month contract. When you upgrade and get a new handset your 12 month contract is actually 18 months." Now I clearly had the choice from Car Phone Warehouse of 12 months or 18 months. I clearly requested 18 months and was clearly told the number of minutes etc that I would have.

A call to Car Phone Warehouse. Hmmm - they aren't sure what's happened but the person that dealt with me will definitely call back. Well of course they didn't.

So - have you upgraded with an existing supplier recently? Are they *all* as aweful as Orange? Do they all treat their existing customers as something they've scraped off the sole of their boot? Questions to ask:

• Do they give you the same choice of phone at the same price as new customers?
• Do they lock you into different terms to existing customers?
• Are they up-front with what they are offering? Look around the Orange shop or web-site - they are full of 'free with £35 contract' - no mention anywhere that if you are an existing customer you might as well not bother looking round their shop and may as well bin the Orange brochure they have.

I'd like to know because as soon as this contract is up I'm moving from Orange. They have lost a hitherto happy customer. The rest of my family will follow in due time so that will be 3 lost customers.

My recommendation is never upgrade with Orange. Always move away from them. What is your experience?

I came across Wabbadabba a while back but never looked in any great detail. I've just received a press release though exclaiming that they have almost given away 3000 prizes in their first six months of operation - just for searching. The 3000th prize will be a Nintendo Wii.

I know there are a few GadgetSpeak members that like the odd prize draw so thought I'd mention it here!

Previous prizes include iPods, cinema tickets, Amazon vouchers, a flat-screen TV and a Nintendo Wii (obviously popular).

Search results are provided by Yahoo - and there are apparently 45,000 users each week (not sure what that says about the chances of winning!)

I've just done a few searches - obviously not my lucky day and I didn't win anything - maybe you'll have better luck?

Of course you may well stand a better chance with the GadgetSpeak prizedraws - you are a member aren't you? No? Why not sign up?

It's always good to see common sense work it's way through the thick walls of the music industry. Warner have seen the light and realised (finally) that DRM (Digital Rights Management) is not the way to go and have started to open up their music library in partnership with Amazon's MP3 shop.

The view of the music industry over the last decade seems to have been to attempt to screw more money out of legitimate customers for an inferior product with significantly more restrictions. Today you can buy a CD and be free to copy that music for personal use onto your MP3 player, your tape machine or even your computer. Alternatively you can download a DRM protected track at virtually the same cost (but much bigger profits for the music industry) and have your ability to use that music severely curtailed (no - you can't put it on a CD to use in your car, you can't put it on your non-DRM MP3 player, you can't..., you can't).

It's a wonder the environmentally friendly download industry ever got off the ground!

DRM of course only restricts the rights of individual buyers. It in no way stops illegal copying of music - just search Google for ways of circumventing DRM and you'll see just how badly this technology works!

So... it is great to hear that some clear thinking has been happening at Warner and that they have joined the growing band of music publishers that are seeing the light. Amazon already has partnerships with Universal and EMI so now the only major publisher left out in the cold is Sony!

Here in the UK of course Amazon do not yet have an MP3 shop - so we'll have to wait for the light to reach us!

I reviewed this product a little while ago (black version) and found it to be excellent - and at a very good price. I've just been told that Comet are offering the Silver one for a further £30 discount until the 8th November. At £149.99 for a 160Gbyte PVR - that has to be very good value for money.

Here's the link to the page on Comet - all you have to do is to remember to type HUMAX30 into the promotional code box once you've added it to your shopping basket. Be quick though - this offer ends on the 8th of November!

Looks like Sony are going to miss yet another Christmas with their PlayStation 3 console - in Europe at least. This time it appears to be unable to source sufficient components to meet world-wide demand and so is going to concentrate on the key markets of America and it's home region - Europe misses out again, but then if Europe were to pull it's finger out maybe we'd make some of our own products!

Not only is Sonys position in the gaming market under threat from continued delays but also their hope of getting BluRay established as the next defacto standard high density (HD-DVD) format. Having been on the receiving end of Sony Betamax and numerous attempts by Sony to 'go their own way' (I have a Sony MP3 player that only plays the proprietary ATRAC format) I personally think that's a good thing! I love Sony products, but they win not because of proprietary formats but despite them, which can only work for so long.

What's your view on this? Are you going to hang in there or opt for the XBox 360, or maybe even the Nintindo Wii console?

I know this is a 'gadget' site - and that most gadgets reviewed in here are things people can touch, and most often have buttons people can press. This is however a web log, which as we all know is a place to record general ramblings and so it's perfectly acceptable to deviate a little from the theme to record things we've found and like.

Today I wanted to give mention to a couple of web-sites someone brought to my attention. I like these because they are taking the technology of the web into new areas. I think this is where growth in the Internet is likely to happen over the next few years as the Internet moves more and more into the mainstream.

The sites are :

www.art24sevenMedia.com

www.art24seven.eu.com

One of the great things about these sites and others like them are that they provide a forum for people that might never get around to creating their own web-site, or if they do have no idea how to market their site, get seen on search engines or whatever.

Fiona has invested a lot of time getting these sites going and says they still aren't quite ready - why not take a look and let them know what you think? I'm sure they'd welcome the feedback, and you never know, you might find something to complement your gadget collection :-)

Various reports today suggest Tesco is 'reacting to customer demand' and offering VoIP alongside it's traditional fixed line and mobile telecoms products. I've searched through the Tesco site, but haven't found anything either in terms of product or even a news release.

As a very happy Skype customer it'll be interesting to see how Tesco manage to compete and what protocols they are using (hopefully sticking to standards, although I know Skype doesn't!)

Rumour has it that Tesco will be charging more for calls to UK landlines than Skype (2p/min v. 1.2p/min for Skype), but a good deal less for calls to mobiles. Hopefully this will drive Skype to reduce it's rates on mobiles as well. A little competition never did anyone any harm, although I do worry about Tesco dominating yet another market.

All you have to do is pop down to your local Tescos and pick up a 'pack' that includes some credit and a USB phone.

My experience of using 'standard' VoIP products revealed real problems with getting calls through pretty standard retail ADSL routers so it will be interesting to see how Tesco cope with this and how good they are at dealing with the issues. I doubt they are doing this themselves, so it'll be interesting to see who they have partnered with - does anyone know?

I guess someone has to get the ball rolling - and as I've never tried blogging this is a chance to play!

First of all a Happy New Year to everyone at GadgetSpeak. Hope you're all rested and ready for the new year.

On a gadgety topic - I guess this year should be interesting. Sony are expected to bring out their PS3 to compete with the XBox 360. I wonder how they will do? From here the XBox was like gold-dust, with all outlets displaying out-of-stock signs. But then according to this article on CNET, Sony have done very nicely out of the PSP. Maybe this was a conscious decision not to go head to head with Microsoft at Christmas?

Another gaming product in short supply - to my daughters annoyance - is pink (or for that matter blue) NintindoDS machine. Equally rare is the Nintindogs game. My other daughter has one of those and loves it. I've trying to get her to write up her thoughts on that for GadgetSpeak - we'll see!