"EE Customer Survey" (Part 5)

Checked yesterday and the sub-forum entitled Roving Reporters had disappeared from the main site.
Fast forward a day and in my emails is a nice one titled "Thanks for being Our Roving Reporter!"

Roll on the next email(s) containing my amazon vouchers, now comes the hard decision - What to spend it on?! Or save up and use it when I actually wanna buy something?

It would also be good to see how the pricing structures change?
Hopefully 4G will get cheaper and a truly unlimited data package gets released....

Provider name changed to EE

After a week of completing surveys and mystery shopper based work for EE (aka Orange and T-Mobile) and watching/reading about friends and other people's phone showing EE as their network provider for about a month, I finally got a message that my phone was ready for the change as well.

Before is a snapshot of the text message explaining their combination into EE about a month ago and finally the message I received today.

So before restarting the phone, my network provider was Orange and T-Mobile

Which changed to the combined EE after a quick restart...

Now to see what changes it actually does, and whether or not my internet radio streaming in the car keeps buffering due to the loss of signal of one network when it tries and connects to the other!

"EE Customer Survey" using Android App: iPinion+ (Part 4)

Although I've already done the required tasks for the EE survey/roving reporters to qualify for the £50 Amazon vouchers I've realised that I haven't posted about how to use this app.

Once I've opened the app I'm greeted with this home screen.

Tapping on the App Reporter gives this title page.
And everything after this is rather self explanatory.

After this screen it links back to the home page, where nothing has changed (last recorded activity and points total the same.)

"EE Customer Survey" (Part 3)

Almost at the end of the week and another email highlighting another 2 tasks (so 6 tasks in total to do, when only 4 are needed to get the £50 payment.)  As they don't take me much time to do here goes:

The 6th task (which came first in the email before the 5th task!)
was to watch the Kevin Baker advert and post some feedback through their survey style page (only took 4 minutes or so.)

The 5th task was another topic on the forums:
EE now offer a range of fixed broadband plans for the home including fibre optic broadband
Have a look at www.ee.co.uk for the information you’d like to see on EE home broadband and let us know what you think here.

- What information were you looking for?
- What information was easy to find?
- What info couldn’t you find easily?
- Do you still have any questions about EE’s fixed broadband or fibre optic broadband plans after looking at the website?

I had already looked at their website in the past so it was a quick 2 minutes writeup....

"EE Customer Survey" (Part 2)

So..... a few days have passed since enrolling in this task but has it been worth it?!

1st of all an email confirming my acceptance and notice of bonus special prizes!
Hopefully I hadn't checked my email prior to going into work on Friday so lost out on a great opportunity to do anything.  It wasn't until Saturday night that I logged in and found 3 tasks (and the special roving reporter forum) available.

Next are a few extracts of the 3 tasks as described in the forums:


Task 1: What do you think of your local store?
Check out your local store this weekend and tell us your thoughts:
• Does it look good from the outside?
• What about in the store – what do you think of the layout?
• How did you feel about the atmosphere in the store – how busy, did you feel welcome?
• And what about the information available in the store– was it clear and was it of interest to you?

We will be reviewing your store feedback on Monday and the best and most detailed report will receive a £20 Amazon voucher.

This I wrote about 5/6 posts as I went around the store in Manchester Fort, the 4 inside the City Centre (in and around the Arndale Centre) and the last store in the top floor of the Trafford Centre.

Task 2: What have you seen, heard or read recently about mobile / broadband operators
Tell us about any advertising, news articles or anything else you’ve seen or heard about on the TV, internet, radio or in newspapers, or when out and about, for mobile or broadband operators.
It would be great if you could take a pic or post a link so that we can see what you are talking about. You can also use the app to photograph and rate it when you’re out and about.
This can be for anything that catches your eye for any mobile or broadband operator brands that you see throughout the week.

Through this topic I found out that I didn't need to use their iPinion+ app and could instead simply upload images or links elsewhere (and as this was easier and faster I've not used the App yet.)

Task 3: Interview friends / family about EE
Today we would very much like you to do a 5 minute interview (okay...chat!!) with a couple of people about what they think about EE and report back.
Have they heard of EE before?
Do they know what EE sells?
What do they think of EE?

Let us know here what they had to say.


This was a quick reply after chatting to some friends and relatives.

Annoying after the massive amount of linked posts I put on the 1st topic I saw this email and thought that's it I didn't win the bonus £20 amazon voucher prize!

However in today's email I saw this (with my name as the winner!!!!!)
Roll on the next bonus prize(s) and final payment!

The last task:

Task 4: Getting social

As well as new shops and a new website, EE also has a shiny new Facebook and Twitter page.

Members and non-members of these sites can review what people are saying by clicking here:
Facebook: http://en-gb.facebook.com/ee
Twitter: http://twitter.com/EE

We’d really like your opinion on what you think about them, please can you have a look around and come back here to report back?

What do you think about the types of things EE says and does on their Facebook and/or Twitter pages? What do you think about the types of things other people say to EE? If you’d like, and are a member, try asking EE a question and see if/what EE replies.

What kind of atmosphere is there on the Facebook page, and how does that make you feel?

Is there anything that EE DON’T do on their Facebook / Twitter pages that you’d like to see, or like to see more of?

Of which I spent another 20 minutes doing, so that's my 4 tasks done (and payment eligibility complete!)
However as the tasks seem simple and actually interesting I will/may be doing more as they get released - especially as there are easily achievable bonus prizes!

"EE Customer Survey" using Android App: iPinion+ (Part 1)

Being a 'veteran' market research "assistant" I was more than happy to sign up/register an interest in doing some market research for T-Mobile.  Well, I do get a £50 Amazon Gift Voucher for completing certain tasks over 1 week so why not!!

Anyway, this I learnt through their newly launched forum which is trying to gather general opinion of the new EE (4G) mobile network.

1st of all the email I got for the notification that I got picked (rather happy that I'm one of 30!)
Username/Password blanked off for security reasons!
So if 30 people get £50 gift vouchers than this Marketing Campaign could have potentially spent £1500!

And screenshots of the App on Google Play Store.

Note that there is an iPinion and an iPinion+ app (we wanted the 2nd!)

 Once installed and opened their a sign-in page which the earlier provided credentials worked.

Once logged in, the main menu shows a quick overview of what surveys etc are available - as this isn't active till tomorrow I'll add another post showing more of the app (at a later date and time.)

That's it for now, keep tuned in for a more detailed post on its inner workings!

Still no sign of EE signal/network name *Manchester*

As the rollout of EE aka the 1st 4G network began active in Manchester last week (or was it earlier this?) some people have already seen the name on their 'connected' network and also a speed increase (1.4meg to 3Mbps+!)

However mine hasn't changed and is constantly either:
* Switching from the main T-Mobile network to the fall back Orange
* Or losing all 3G (Internet/Data usable) connections and failing to load any websites etc!

Checked with my cousin yesterday who is on Orange and his blackberry shows EE, so it's not the area where my home is.  Attempted to turn off my mobile and removed the battery for >5 minutes to get it to lose any internal memory but alas no changes.  (It did lose the time and date though!)

 Quickly checked the "Settings" page > "Wireless & Network Settings" > "Mobile Network" > "Network operators" to do a manual search and all the UK 'major' networks could be seen but no sign of EE

Will try this again in a few days before contacting T-Mobile as it's annoying the Internet Connection isn't always there due to signal strength!

Return of Faulty Toshiba A500-1GL (Part 8) *Not FIXED?*

A few days have passed and already I'm hearing complaints from my Dad (who heard it from Mum who was winge-d at by my sister) that the computer was crashing.

When I got around to asking her about it, she said she was watching videos when the screen went black, and so she went to do some cooking.  Another 30 minutes later it had recovered so I told her to try again so that the reliability history/log could get some more statistics for me to see.

Another day passed and my little brother says it crashed last night and did 'crazy things.'
Nothing defined so I'm gonna have to ask Toshiba what they did.
Too bad their email contacts have been from a generic 'Do you reply to this email' so it will have to wait till my next day off work (at which point I'll probably forget to do so..)

Anyway THANKFULLY no-one has seen a Blue Screen of Death YET (BSOD!) so hopefully it's a simple driver issue this time?!

Return of Faulty Toshiba A500-1GL (Part 7) *FIXED?*

Slightly disappointed yesterday that no Parcels/Laptop turned up at my work address.
Hoped it would be home by the time I got home but nothing (not even a 'we tried to deliver' note...)

So T-Minus 2 working days till their own set deadline.
Quickly re-read what the online tracker said and it had a UPS tracking reference with a date of 29th October 2012, so boohoo to that (as it would be Monday!)

Imagine my surprise when I get to work today (T-Minus 1 working day) and my colleagues tell me it's arrived...  However I didn't get a break till close to 4pm so couldn't do anything till them.
On my break I quickly turned it on, connected to the local wireless network, downloaded/installed VLC Player and then tested numerous large files (ranging from 7GB to 13GB!) and left it running till about 7.30pm.  Not a squeak! so woohoo.

Got home around 10pm and up to this point (close to 1AM) of installing updates, restarting a few times, un-installing the crappy McAfee for Comodo Internet Security, emptying about 100GB of data from an external HDD, it's still going fine!

On a side note the number '2' key on the numeric pad (which was broken and NOT sent back) has been kindly fixed/replaced by Toshiba so SUPER KUDOS to them!

So far up time of about 7 hours and not 1 0x116 Graphics card error so WOOHOO *Problem solved!*

At this point in time the Toshiba online tracker has updated to say:

26.10.2012 09:04

Closed Resolved

One bad thing is that the original packaging I bought the laptop in (and used to return) has been retained and instead I have a SUPERSIZED brown cardboard box. (Following are the pictures of said box)

A quick boot shows the same graphics card model installed so maybe it was swapped?

But a fresh install of Windows 7 (no service packs though!?)

******************************************************************************


While we're on the topic, WOW so much bloatware pre-installed (see the size of the list!)
Only things I've installed is Comodo Internet Security, VLC Media Player and WinRar

And of course a removal of the crappy whiny McAfee Security package is deserved!

Just see how many updates it needed to install/apply!

116 updates over 42665 operations!

And only after using Internet Explorer a few times and restarting the laptop a couple more does it give you the 'European Court Enforced' Browser Ballet screen!

How many can you recognise?

******************************************************************************

F*** did I speak too soon (15 minutes later and there's this screen...)

To be honest though black screen for literally 1 second and it quickly recovered (hardly noticeable!)

Now that I've:
* ALMOST emptied my sister's backup off my Hard Drive,
* Installed my network printer driver
* Set-up the wireless access at the chippy
* Installed a better internet security package
She can have the laptop back (and test it herself) and give my dad his laptop back.