Wisetechie Blog : Ctrl your Tech Life

Jubilant Foods recently went post IPO so the revenue pressure seems to be there , today we ordered some stuff from Dominos Pizza and I decided to order online using some coupon codes I had. I got the pizza soon enough in 30 minutes . This new service by Dominos India seemed amazing at first look.

But I was in for a surprise, an hour later the outlet called me and told me that no coupons were applicable on what I had ordered and asked me to pay even more money equivalent to original price of the items + tax. This call came 1 hour after my order by the way so I was all the way through the pizzas. The difference in price was around a huge difference before and after coupon.

Anyway, I didn’t want to argue so accepted the revised price (handwritten and overwritten). But this just exposes the chinks in Dominos Pizza’s offerings as the online ordering service can be very misleading especially with regards to coupons, you may think you have gotten a bargain but the local outlet can spoil your party. Wont be ordering from Dominos pizza some some time at-least.

Don’t know if the local outlet will pocket the extra money as the printed bill still lists the original price. In any case Jubilant Foods need to get their act together.

Tata Sky , easily the most popular DTH service (in terms of opinion) in India is again raising prices. This time its the multiroom charge. The existing charge for multiroom subscriptions was Rs. 125 but today I received an SMS that the charge has been revised to Rs. 150 per  moth.

Couple that with each new channel going into a new package, Tata Sky is really an expensive proposition for the customer. Since its launch I am yet to see a customer friendly move from dear Tata Sky.

Earlier they created this Gold Pack which would have all the new channels. When people subscribed to that, they came out with lifestyle pack. Thats the latest one they are filling with channels including Discovery Science (lifestyle yeah !, wonder if they show how to make cocktails).

Before that they were notorious for hooking people on with 6 months free scheme and then raising prices like crazy.

And another instance is the unbundling of ESPN Star Sports when they had publicly humiliated and refuted Tata Sky’s claim of actually lowering costs for their customers.

Some very smart MBAs with zero concern for customers are working with this company. Lets hope they realise what they are doing wrong.

It has been 2 years and 3 months since I had bought my Dell Inspiron 1525 Laptop. Mine was one of the last batches to have been made in Malaysia with most of the assembling shifting to Bangalore later on for Indian customers. I was lucky as my original laptop was pretty robust, but one thing you notice with DELL is their lack of concern for quality in various parts.

Almost everyone in my class owns a DELL and has had to invoke the warranty atleast twice. Which brings me to a good point DELL India’s warranty is probably the only thing worth writing home about. Seriously good warranty and replacement of parts once you get past the call center. That’s why I always made an online complaint whenever I needed to invoke the warranty, no need to speak to Indian call center agents who talk to you as if each replacement part is being cut out of their salary. But this post isn’t about that, its about my ownership experience with the DELL Inspiron 1525 where it fell short and where it did good.

The Good

The laptop itself is the good thing, its working alright and all of the insides work perfectly. Its easy to clean and the RAM is pretty easy to upgrade. And that’s about it.

The Bad

Extremely pathetic plastic quality. The keyboard keys are fragile (tab broke, had to be fixed with fevikwik),one of the touchpad buttons is faulty, the palm-rest plastic is discoloured and the hinges are loose. The adaptor wire seems like its ready to break off and the power button is also losing its coating of chromium (?). But to be honest, all these things were changed in warranty except the button,adaptor and hinges. The palmrest had been broken by a Dell employee in a service visit. The keyboard had stopped working twice. The replacement parts seem to be of cheaper quality than the originals which is a very worrying prospect.

The battery is by far the worst thing in the laptop and worst of all warranty customer care wont cover it. It used to give only 3.5 hours when new and now barely gives 45 minutes on battery saver mode. Its still better than one of my friend’s Inspiron 1520, after 2 years his battery stopped all backup altogether. On the contrary one of my friends’ laptop from Dubai still gives 3 hours after 1.5 years of usage. Not sure if they get a better battery in Dubai shops.

The Ugly

Well nothing really ugly about it, its just that the manufacturing is done keeping in mind to have a low period of ownership. The only ugly i see is that 1.5 years into ownership the mic stopped working and to replace it I probably need to replace the motherboard.

Would I buy a DELL again ?

Yes, but not from India. This was my first experience with DELL India and I am now a wiser man , I would much rather wait for a relative from the US and have a better quality of laptop construction and parts. I have a DELL US laptop (Vostro) and also a Lenovo US laptop and their quality seems to be much better than the India counterpart without a need to invoke any warranty even.

If you are a Paypal Indian customer, your life with Paypal is officially over thanks to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Indian Government. You would have received an email to this effect already and would have realised that the Paypal account you so cherished is now just a wormhole to bring money into your bank account. You cannot use your earnings to purchase stuff on the Internet. So you can no longer use the hard earned money from your website to purchase hosting or to pay for the domain name of the said website. Under normal Indian Tax laws, these are perfectly acceptable uses for your earned money and infact are even deducted for the purpose of calculating taxable income from your business/service. The intentions of the Government are pretty clear. They want all this forex in Indian accounts but they dont want to give any leeway to Indians who are earning this money. A sad day in cyberspace for Indians indeed.

In compliance with Indian regulations, if you are selling products and services to customers globally, please review the following important information:

•       Any proceeds or earnings received into your PayPal account from the export of    goods and services should be withdrawn to your bank account within 30 days.

•       While making the withdrawal please make sure you select the purpose code that best fits your business.

•       Any proceeds or earnings received into your PayPal account from the export of goods and services may only be withdrawn to your bank account in India.  This received amount cannot be reused for making purchases.

•    If you would like to make purchases on any website that accepts PayPal, you can continue to use any credit card issued by a bank in India.

If you do use an Indian credit card to pay via Paypal it would actually mean double payment of commission to Paypal , once at time of receiving the forex and next time at the time of sending it since Paypal earns a lot through forex rates.

Its not Paypal’s fault though, its obvious the Indian Government and RBI had a larger role to play in this fiasco.

Incident 1:

I am really angry at Airtel right now, it all started 3 weeks ago when I decided to open Airtel Live after a span of around 4 years. I saw a link for some yoga thing, thinking that it was some application for yoga I decided to check it out. On the next page I figured out it was just a way to sell photos so I quit Airtel Live then and there. The thing to remember is the page where I quit was a portal page with links to content. I had not downloaded any content, nor was info about charges relayed to me.

After about an hour I saw that Rs.10 had been deducted from my balance and I have been subscribed to ‘celebyoga’ service. Angry that I never subscribed to the service and that the charge information wasn’t relayed to me, I called up Airtel and asked them to refund my money. The CC executive refunded my money immediately. I decided to pursue the matter and asked Airtel for how the consent for the service was obtained by me. I got a stupid copy paste reply :

We would like to assure you that just like a call gets captured only after it originates from a mobile and gets connected to the called number, similarly, the download made you gets captured only if you click on the content, which is then charged accordingly.

After exchanging 4-5 mails I was fed up and stopped pursuing the matter thinking that I didn’t lose anything. The service was deactivated after 3-4 days and repeated reminders.

Incident 2:

Then on 6th April it happened again. While driving I got a message that I have subscribed to bollywood services, I am like What the Hell (atleast they should have made it Hollywood to suit my taste). The strange thing this time was that I had NOT even opened Airtel Live.

I got my money back again but Airtel still insists I clicked on the content which is preposterous since I had deleted the Airtel Live settings after incident number 1.

They say it might have happened without my consent, strange again since I never give my phone to anyone.  I got the same reply as above and they claim they have investigated the issue. (and sent the same copy paste reply). The existence of such a copy past reply actually proves that this is happening very often that they had to make a FAQ for it.

Since they refuse to accept that I never clicked on the content its really hard for them to trace the people causing this illegal activity. Hopefully it wont happen again to my phone. I can imagine some agent sitting somewhere and randomly subscribing people to services, the sad part being that some must be gullible enough not to confront Airtel on this.

Anyway I got a followup call again with the operator insisting that I had infact subscribed to their services, I gave him a piece of my mind and he promptly retreated. I have been asking them for records of taking my consent but I haven’t been able to get a proper reply.

It must be so satisfying being Steve Jobs, you made a product, make it all jazzy, have a keynote where thousands come to attend just because there is a fruit name attached to it and later on all of these thousands of fans and more actually buy the overpriced electronics device you are peddling like soaps and toothpaste.

A recent Techcrunch article pegged the sales of the Ipad at 300k items. Not only that apparently the Apple fanatics downloaded 1 million applications from the Apple app store. Thats around 3.33 applications per Ipad (lots of money these Apple target customers have).

Its one great day for Apple but another sad day for consumers who buy sensibly and do not buy anything that shiny and has a fruit drawn on it

‘The product is yet to be released in India till now, but we can already see many import websites wagging their tails with the prospects of the rich brats ordering their Ipads asap and also those with rich uncles will get their Ipads on their next trip.

Is the Apple Ipad a game changer ? A new killer device inbetween a cellphone and a laptop ? , only time will tell.