I recently got myself a nice new iPhone 4 with Orange. I have been with O2 for a few years now and one thing that really bugged me was the fact that you couldn’t get a proper PDF copy of your bill. Billing was all done online but the only way to view the bill was on their website. There was a download button but all that did was display a new trimmed down webpage with far too little information to be considered an actual bill…

So after many requests for them to change this I decided I had had enough and started looking for a new place to get my next phone from. In the end I decided to move to Orange as their package seemed to be pretty good value for money.

Anyway just before I actually made my move to Orange, O2 decided to implement a proper billing system and I was able to get my latest bill in PDF format. In fact I could download all my historical bills in PDF format as well… Looking back was this even a good reason to switch supplier anyway?

Well I had made my decision and I shopped around to see what was on offer. Orange seemed to be slightly cheaper than O2 both on the handset and the package available at the price point I was looking at. So my decision was made…

Was it the right one? Well I still don’t know for sure. I haven’t actually received a bill yet so let’s hope I can get a proper downloadable PDF with Orange.

One annoyance that I haven’t been able to solve yet is the Visual Voicemail feature. This doesn’t seem to be available with Orange. I think this is a bit out of order as nowhere did I see mention of this before buying the phone and signing up for a 2 year contract!

This was one of the original selling features of the iPhone and removed the requirement of having to call the mailbox and go through all the stupid menus listening to messages one at a time to see if they are of any relevance. With Visual Voicemail you get a list of all the messages with the callers name against them and can just press play directly on the phone, just on the messages you want, without the need to navigate the automated mailbox system.

This is something I am going to have to chase up in the near future…

As for the phone itself, the screen is a lot clearer on the iPhone 4 and runs much smoother than my old iPhone 3G. I always kept my iPhone 3G up to date and unfortunately this seemed to slow the phone down over time. Some screens could take a second or so before appearing… I don’t think it was the phone so much as the software being too complicated for the early iPhone. The software is designed to work on old and new phones alike. When new, using the initial software that came preloaded with the iPhone 3, the phone seemed very snappy…

One complaint I do have about the new iPhone 4 is the shape is a little bit sharp edged. The iPhone 3 looked very sleek with lovely curved edges. The edge of the iPhone 4 actually feels a bit too sharp when held up to my ear! Hopefully a cover will fix that problem though, something I am on the lookout for.

One last little point that may be of interest. If you plan on selling an old O2 iPhone I came across an article that points you at a website where you can unlock your O2 iPhone for free. This article walks you through what you have to do but basically you just go to an unadvertised page on the O2 website and enter your phones details and then after about a week they will send you a message saying the phone is unlocked and ready for SIM cards from any mobile provider.

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