Fido

Engadget Mobile is my favorite blog next to Guy Kawasaki.  They deliver the most relevant mobile news and are hilarious to boot.  Today's post about Fido's 3G announcement is a perfect example of their genius.  I cede to their brilliance.

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist

About a week ago (August 1, 2007), I started having problems with receiving incoming calls on my unlocked Motorola ROKR E6 mobile phone. My mobile service provider is Fido and I have an unlimited local calling service plan (City Fido) for Cdn$45 a month.

At first I thought I had mistakenly changed the call forward / call divert settings. Nope. Then I did a master reset on my ROKR E6 thinking there was a problem with the phone. Nope.

Next, I put my Fido SIM into a Nokia phone. I was able to receive incoming calls. So there is nothing wrong with the call divert settings or my Fido SIM.

I then put my Fido SIM into a Motorola E680, and also tried it on a Motorola A768 and A1200/Ming. Nope. Incoming call did not work on any of these Motorola Linux phones.

I then put a Rogers Wireless SIM into the ROKR E6. Incoming calls worked just fine. So the problem had to do with my Fido SIM in combination with a Motorola Linux phone.

To ensure that there was not a problem with my Fido SIM, I went out and purchased a replacement SIM from Fido. No luck. The new replacement Fido SIM still did not work with the ROKR E6 for incoming calls. At this point, I had no choice but to put the new SIM into a Nokia phone so that I can at least receive incoming calls.

Then something mysterious happened. This new replacement Fido SIM was empty with no contacts stored on it. The Nokia phone that I was using also had an empty address book. Yet when someone called me, the caller name showed up on the call display. That was interesting because my Fido service plan includes Caller ID service feature but I did not subscribe to caller name display service feature.

I finally called Fido customer service. Sure enough Fido started a free promotional offer for the caller name display feature on the exact date that I started having problems with receiving incoming calls on my Motorola E6. It appears that incoming calls fail for all Motorola Linux phones such as A768, A780, E680, A1200/Ming, ROKR E6 on the Fido network if calling name display feature is turned on. I had to ask Fido to do me a favor and disable the free promotional calling name display feature so that I can receive incoming calls on the ROKR E6.

Colin
EQO Founder & CTO