Last week my Xbox 360 was hit by the wide spread problem of hardware failure which has been dubbed as ‘the red ring of death’. For those who don’t know this is a common problem which seems to affect a wide range of Xbox 360 consoles and has even been featured on the BBC’s Watchdog program in February this year.
The first thing that crossed my mind when this happened apart from the initial annoyance the problem caused was how much it would cost to get repaired as it has just passed the twelve month warranty period. My first line of enquiry was to drop David an e-mail as he had the same problem about a month ago. David was quick to reply with some good news and some bad news the good news was that Microsoft are now fixing the red ring of death problem for free or by replacing your machine if it cannot be fixed. This brings us on to the bad news, I called the number provided by David to find out how to ship my 360 to Microsoft and they promptly sent a UPS delivery guy to pick the console up last Monday (12/11/07) which was good but it will take three weeks for the console to be fixed or replaced and means missing out on nearly a month of my Xbox live subscription and missing out on the free arcade game offer…not cool.
However the good news certainly does outweigh the bad as when the red ring of death problem was first reported it all the repairs and shipping had to be paid for. This also means that now I can get back to playing my Wii console which I did not take with me to Bolton so this means that now I can finally complete The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess, which I have had for nearly a year now and it is a fantastic game so I look forward to seeing how its plot unfolds.
As nearly everyone knows the Apple iPhone went on sale in the US earlier this year (29/06/07) and received an incredible response. I was pleased that the iPhone UK release date was 09/11/07 and the carrier was O2 as O2 is my carrier and my contract was due for renewal in November. However with the O2 iPhone contract which is unlike other phone contracts where you get a phone for free instead the iPhone will set you back £269. This is a huge leap from getting a free phone and then there is the array of different contract tariffs, the contract I selected is £35 per month which lasts 18 months.
I was willing to pay the £269 as I knew what the phone had to offer and already managed to have a trial run on the device briefly in September thanks to a good friend who could not wait for the UK release and had their iPhone imported. My first impression was utter amazement, I was very impressed with the touch screen and wireless access which was much better than expected.
Consequently when I purchased my iPhone I was not disappointed and I feel that it was worth every penny of the £269 due to vast amount of features it has to offer the best of which in my opinion are the iPod and wireless internet access (a full list of the iPhone features can be found here).
The only small issue I did have with the iPhone for the first four days was with the on screen keyboard as I found that I kept hitting the wrong keys which proved to be rather irritating however after four days this was no longer an issue and I think it’s fantastic.
Overall after using the iPhone for over a week now I am very pleased with this introduction into the smart phone market and hope that apple continue to develop more phones in the future as well as upgrading the storage capacity, which for the UK iPhone was 8GB (I believe in the US there was also a 4GB version available on the launch day in addition to the 8GB version). Even though it is clearly an expensive device I found that it has already become extremely useful and means that I do not have to carry around my phone and iPod as two separate devices. Excellent!