Roaming in Seattle

[Guest Wizard]

I was in Seattle this last week and before I went I called Orange to make sure everything was set up for roaming. They said it was, but I discovered that they have no roaming agreements with *any* GPRS network in Washington state, and even worse, while I was there SMS failed about 70% of the time. I got a message saying the message had not been sent although sometimes it had and sometimes it hadn't.

The irony of course is that taking a Microsoft SmartPhone 'home' to where the OS was written results in a phone that is next to useless for anything but making and receiving calls (which itself is fairly limited because CLID doesn't seem to work internationally). :-)

Another strange thing I noticed was that it took a long time to persuade the phone to use a local network in the States. I am a bit dim, so it took an MS empoyee to point out that I needed to change the band the phone was using (to PCS) before it would work, but even after doing that it was several minutes before the phone provided me with a list of networks to choose from. The Ericsson t68i happily jumps to the PCS band without being manually reconfigured (nor does it *reboot* in the way the SPV does when you change band!), so why does the SPV need to be manually configured to work in the US band?

Wizard

[Guest Matt Whitfield]

Obviously something to do with the way they've written the radio I/F s/w... sounds like another s/w bug!