They have fairly regular “competitions” to win something, the most recent was to win a chance of winning a Million Dollars. I entered knowing that I would receive a phone call about getting their services – this didn’t bother me because I wanted to know how much roof restoration was going to cost anyway.

I received a phone call from them telling me I hadn’t won, but I was one of the lucky consolation prize winners and I had won $500 off any of their products (I think everyone would be offered this I am sure). I told them I would be home the next day with another contractor coming around and if someone could come around then they would be able to other than that it would be too hard to organise.

Eugene came around they got up on the roof and inspected the roof and said it was bad. He did a few measurements then came inside and started the whole sales spiel – how their product was better than everyone else etc. I told him I was just after a price – he proceeded to give me a price of $8,400. I said thanks but I wasn’t prepared to spend that sort of money. So he started the push and talking about making it into a display home with a sign up for 20 weeks and that I would have to provide names of 3 people and 3 before and after photos as part of the deal, for this they would knock off $1,500. He rang his boss to confirm that and it was fine at their end.

I told him thanks but I was just after a price and it was still too high to proceed with anything today. He wasn’t happy with no for an answere, so he rang his boss again to see if they could do anything else for me in regards to the price. I mentioned $4,000 (thinking there was no way they could offer it to me for half the price) as a decent figure, he told his boss that also. They managed to get the price down to $4,400 – the display home sign had to be up for 32 weeks, I had to provide names of 6 people and 6 before and after photos. I said its a good price but I am not signing up today it was never my intention too I was after pricing and that was all. He wasn’t particularly happy but he accepted it in the end, he rang his boss to inform him and this is where the fun really ramped up.

His boss (Phil Brooks) wanted to speak with me, he explained rather rudely that he had gone to extreme lengths to get the discounts he got for me (extreme lengths in 2 x 30sec phone calls is interesting) and proceeded to ask me why I wasn’t signing up today. I explained to him that I told the initial call operator I was only after pricing so I knew how much I needed to budget and that I wasn’t ready to put $8,000 on the table today. His rudeness then went to the extreme by telling me that he no longer wanted to deal with me and the company did not want my business – not sure what he said after that because at that point I hung up and nicely asked Eugene (the salesman who attended my house) to leave.

It actually gets better – about an hour later there was a knock at my door (I still haven’t got a door bell yet). It was a lovely lady with a Bramalco shirt on – what was she doing here I thought. Well she was actually from Bramalco Streamline (or Streamline Bramalco not sure which) trying to sell me a different Bramalco product – I told her my sob story about Bramalco then asked her nicely to leave because I wanted nothing to do with Bramalco ever again.

Since all this occurred my brother in law came over and doesn’t reckon the roof is too bad and says there are probably better things to spend my money on around the house than doing the roof at this stage and I would take his word over some Bramalco salesman any day.

I have a HP iPaq 4150 PDA which runs Windows Mobile 2003 which I have had for about 3 years (maybe a little longer) and I have slowly learnt how to use it and where all the settings are that I might need to change. I have managed to use it for all the things that I have wanted to do – GPS Navigation, Connect to internet via BT with my phone for browsing and connecting to my ISP email, also via wifi at home and on the road at various hot spots. Recently work has decided they want to be more mobile and have people with access to their email on their phones. As we run Lotus Notes, it doesn’t work out of the box, so we installed and tested a program called Commontime mSuite – which works well for the job, and it works easily on my PDA via WIFI – haven’t been bothered to connect via BT and my phone.

Here is where the fun begins, the next test was the purchase of a couple of PDAs to test. A couple of people at work needed new phones so we purchased 2 imates, a K-Jam and a Jamin. Both of these devices are PDA’s with built in GSM phones, they are crap they are 200MHz processors compared to my 450MHz processor. So you ask why didn’t I investigate it further – I did and Telstra shop assured me the new processors were better that they didn’t need to be as fast. That is all well and good just for a phone but these aren’t just phones and they soon become very slow to respond after running just a couple of applications. Often you end up needing to do a hard reset on them and they take about 2minutes to do the reset, compared with my 20secs on my iPaq.

Then to add to that a lot of the settings are in different positions to the iPaq and they just don’t seem to be in intuitive spots, I don’t know why they change things so dramatically, ok fix up problems and add new functionality but why so drastic.

Does anyone have any other thoughts on this, maybe you think Mobile 5 is better, but my experience doesnt tell me this.

Will the new i-mates have faster processors, we have made a decision at work that the phones are good, but we wont be buying any more until the 3G phones start coming out and we can see some real world speed figures instead of Telstra arbitary figures.

That is it for now, later