SwimFinsSF

Cingular and Web Browsing on a RAZR V3

For a month or two now i’ve been having problems using my slick little black RAZR to browse web sites. I was able to click on the little ‘Web’ button on the phone and get to Cingular’s little home page with all of their stuff on it however any time I tried to ‘Go to URL’ from there I would get a ‘Page cannot be displayed’ error. This started happening a little while ago and happened and would happen for every web site I tried to go too off of Cingular’s site – everything from Google and Next bus to some.. er.. um.. others! ;)..

Finally this morning I decided to call Cingular and get them to fix it. After the requisite inane walk through of all the obvious stuff (which I did dutifully out of politeness even though I KNEW that wasn’t the problem) they proceeded to tell me me that it wasn’t their problem and that I should contact the sites I was having trouble with.. Thats where steam started coming out of my ears but I managed to keep my cool and pressed the issue. I somewhat calmly explained to them that, while I could belive that many sites might have problems on phones and the sites would have to change, I could not accept that EVERY site would have a problem and it would be my duty to contact each individually. I explained that I was paying for web service, not cingular ‘portal’ access, and that if she could point me to a single non-cingular site that would work I would go away quietly and leave her alone – however if she couldn’t then we would have a problem to deal with. I think thats the point that she realized that a) I knew what I was talking about, b) I wasn’t going to just go away without a fight, and c) that their service wasn’t functioning as advertised. She put me on hold

When she came back she directed me down a different obscure path to take the phone directly to a URL without going to cingular’s portal first. When I did this I was finally able to get to other sites. So, as it turns out, Cingular’s portal puts the phone in a state where it can’t escape to other sites. The only way to get to other sites is to enter the browser without going there… I mentioned that that might be a bug that they should fix, she didn’t even know what I was talking about. So, while I think they’ve got something that they need to fix (or they’ve got some fascist policy in place), I can now do what I need to do..

To her credit, she was very polite and did her best to help, she and her tech support folks seemed to be trying hard to make calls go away by convincing users their issues aren’t things for cingular to solve rather than sincerely trying to solve the problem.. This is pretty in line with the crappy customer support I’ve gotten from singular for years and it irritates the shit out of me. Guess its another own side of corporate consolidation – when you become a big guy you stop giving a fuck about how you treat your customer and it shows.. The little guys try harder and seem to sincerely care – the big guys don’t seem to give a fuck..

Anyway.. Just wanted to post this should someone else hit this problem – googling and finding descriptions like this has helped me twice in as many days.. 🙂

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