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Dialaphone Review

It’s like that film, 28 days later…

I recently decided to get a Sony PSP. I still love my DS but I was lured by the power of the PSP and frankly I haven’t seen any good DS games for a while. Anyway I decided that instead of just gong out the shop or buying one online I would renew my mobile phone contract. Dialaphone had an offer that would get me a new phone which I could give to my partner as I already have a fairly decent Nokia N95, £70 cash back and a Sony PSP. Now I realise that you are essentially still buying the PSP but the contract was actually cheaper than I was currently paying so it made sense.

I had problems from the word go. When I added the phone I wanted to the shopping cart, the PSP and all other offers strangely disappeared and I became a tiny bit suspicious of the website. I decided I better make my order by phone. I thought there might be a catch of some sort so I carefully checked the terms and conditions that are on every page. See below

You will notice there is no mention of the free gift but there is mention that you will be getting free next day delivery. Great! Well actually not so great because only when you purchase your phone and sign up to your contract do you get to find out that you have to wait 28 days before they will part with any free gifts. You see, the thing is they get a commissions from orange, o2 or whoever you go with and use part of that free commission to entice you in. Its win-win for them. They don’t want anyone closing their contract with the phone provider otherwise they will be out of pocket. The problem is people tend to do a lot less impulse buying when they find out their “free” PSP, Wii, Playstation or whatever will take over a month to arrive. So they carefully omit to tell you this.

Is this deception? I’m not sure but all I do know is that I genuinely thought I would have my PSP within a couple of weeks and it turns out I will actually have to wait over 5 weeks. I wanted to clarify the situation so I phoned their support system. Unlike the nice people in sales, the support system is run a robot called Rachel. Rachel recognises voices commands and understands your post code and date of birth. I am not taking the mick – she really is a robot, a very limited AI program, possibly running of one of the old Nokia 8210’s they have lying around. Anyway, I was getting nowhere with Rachel, she was severely lacking in charisma so I decided to email a support request in:

Hi

I am just wondering, am I likely to have to wait the whole 28 days for my free gift? My contract is connected now and I don’t intend to cancel.

Many thanks

I received and email the next day stating:

Dear X

Customer Reference: xxxxx

Thank you for contacting Dial-A-Phone Customer Care.

Unfortunately for security reasons we ask that all customers must wait until 28 days after their 7 day peace of mind period before any free gift will be despatched.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Kind Regards,

Dial-A-Phone Customer Care

Yours sincerely,

Dial-a-Phone Customer Care.

I’m not sure why they said kind regards and your sincerely, but anyway I emailed back:

Read more

ColsolePlus.co.uk Review
Rating 8.5/10

Pros
Excellent Customer Support
Generally Fast Delivery
Have items in stock

Cons
Prices could be marginally cheaper
Stock count isn’t always accurate

After my last fiasco I was more than a little paranoid about purchasing Nds equipment online. Before ordering from Console Plus, I checked out their website, reviews and inbound links and all seemed right. I was ordering an EZ Flash 3in1 tool, and I managed to find one for £17.90 – not as cheap as a few places I have seen but these guys actually have stock, unlike many companies which just place an order once they have taken your money. I paid extra for next day delivery, £5.90 in fact. I thought after 3 weeks of waiting for the other shop to deliver I would treat myself! Well it didn’t get there the next day, or the day after. I wrote a complaint, asking why this was the case. It seems that their suppler or shipper made a mistake with the shipment and so things were being delayed. I asked why the shopping cart said things were in stock when they were being shipped and the staff politely told me that they pre-order for certain high demand items that are hard to get hold of like the EZ flash tool. Well, I’m not 100% sure if I agree with that in principle, but the fact that this guy was taking the time to answer my questions was reassuring, and I felt I could trust this store.

The actual delivery took a few days instead of the one I had paid for and so Console Plus kindly refunded my shipping, all of it so I just paid for the product. I know my shipping was late, and I am a bit disappointed that the item I ordered wasn’t in stock when the website said it was, but I received excellent customer support. I had daily updates on the process of the order, all which were very polite and well written. In my mind this level of customer support goes a long way, and I genuinely believe them when they say the shipment was late due to reasons out of their control. I will be ordering more items from this store too, and have no problem recommending them. Give them a visit here

Extrememodding.co.uk Review – Avoid this store!
Rating 0/10
As mentioned in a few of my previous posts I recently brought an EZ Flash 3 in 1 tool. Not from this online shop mind, although I did try. I found this website on a gaming forum, I wont be posting the link here because I don’t want to promote the thread and I will also be asking the forum owners to remove all reference to the website I am reviewing.

I placed my order for the very reasonably priced EZ Flash 3 in 1 tool, and prepared to wait the 7-14 days as stated on their website. After the 2nd day I realised I had forgot to specify which version of the tool I would like, the black or the white one, so I contacted them via email. I never received a reply which is what first worried me. After 10 days I emailed them again asking when I could expect to receive the product as the order status had not changed on the website since I made the payment, which is unusual. I did not receive a reply. By now I was very suspicious so I had another look at their website. As well as running several blogs like this one, I actually build websites for a living and I was kicking myself when I looked at the source code of the website only to notice it was just one big frame from another site, essentially the site was pretending to be somewhere it wasn’t. The distinct lack of a phone number and address was also a reason for concern. Alarm bells started to ring. I mean look at the image below, how exactly do you upgrade your phone? Don’t you leave one plugged in while you do this?


The Contact information on the website

I continued to research the site. The site has no inbound links suggesting that its not a very popular one (for good reason). I also had another look at the forum where I first found out about Extrememodding.co.uk and I noticed that all of this guy’s posts were made on a single day, an obvious attempt to promote his own site.

The site is apparently owned by a Mr Ray Barron, and I attempted to contact him via the forum as well as the various email addresses on his website. One of the email addresses is spoofed, it looks like its a genuine email address, but in fact it links to someone else’s, and when I tried their Google Mail email address it simply bounced back, the account was never set up.

Obviously by now I was very alarmed. What worried most is that I might have somehow revealed my PayPal login information to these people so I quickly changed my password and filed a complaint. I have now received a full refund from PayPal, but what really gets me is that I waited around for 3 weeks for something that never turned up – and waiting is one of the things I am least good at.

I know its possible that this guy was ill or something, but all of these suspicious things make me wonder if that could really be true. Maybe the guy just doesn’t have a clue about websites and he was out of the country. I don’t know for sure, all I know is that I was dicked about for 3 weeks needlessly.

I eventually managed to purchase my EZ flash 3 in 1 tool somewhere else. The experience was much happier and I will soon write another review which will completely contrast this one.

Don’t make the mistake I did. If anything seems odd, avoid. Try contacting them before giving them your money, and make sure they have a phone you can call. Above all, avoid Extrememodding.co.uk