I'm signed up to the trial and quite frankly it's useless.
I'll freely admit that I didn't stick around long enough to even see if the phone was any good at all. I guess I'm spoiled, but I have a serious smartphone (Treo 650) crammed with useful software, with a slow-but-unmetered Internet connection on it. That simply doesn't compare with a crappy phone, going back to J2ME being the only expansion option, and fast-but-expensive connectivity. I'm not that big a talker - I prefer SMS or email a lot of the time - and the PCCW system is simply not setup for me. I will not pay a metered rate for Internet connectivity - or at worst, I will pay for usage over a
very generous bundle - and I will absolutely not pay to download crappy promotional content to view on a crappy screen.
A few weeks after I signed up, they called me to get feedback, and I'm sorry to say I laid into the poor bloke who called - I don't think he was really following what I was saying. They have to provide a very significant amount of Internet bandwidth, say a minimum of 1GB per month, for a sensible price, and things like news clips and particularly movie trailers must be free. I expect there to be a location-sensitive link on every trailer page saying "click here to buy tickets for this film to see it TODAY at your local cinema" - and for the cinema to be covering the cost of transmitting the trailer to me.
I may be unrealistic, but it seems to me that PCCW are firmly stuck in the past. They seem to think that the point is to get people in, then charge them as much as possible for every individual thing they do, which is the old telco way of viewing the world. The walled garden is dead, and has been for a while. Nowadays, all I want is
and with the exception of the lack of fast pipe - which is currently a purely technological limitation - Peoples gives me just the service I want. If someone can offer me a fast, unmetered (or large-bundled) connection which I can use with a decent smartphone, I'll jump on it - the cost doesn't matter too much. If someone offers me a fast, pay-by-the-bit, buy-lots-of-content service which you're only meant to use with their crappy phone, I'll put it in a drawer and forget about it, even if it's free.
And that's just what I've done with the PCCW phone. At some point I suppose they'll write to me to ask for it back, and I'll return it with no regrets at all.
