Written by James McDonald

January 5, 2010

Just purchased a cheap-as-chips ($89AUD) Telstra T106 pre-paid phone made by http://www.zte.com.au.

On the pro side:

  • I find it a little more ergonomic but less refined mechanically than the Nokia 6120C
  • It has a built in stop-watch a feature missing from my previous Nokia 6120C.
  • The buttons are nicely raised allowing a little easier use by people with big hands
  • The calculator makes a lot more sense to use than the Nokia 6120C

On the con side:

It doesn’t come with a Micro SD card. (Canabalize your old phone it may have one).

You can switch the phone off accidentally because the hangup button also powers the phone off.

The bundled PC application JoinMe looks like it has been programmed so ZTE can say that they have a feature on a sales brochure, but on use it’s so buggy as to be almost unuseable. Upgrading from the standard Bundled Telstra JoinMe software to the ZTE download doesn’t help.

Some of the weirdness:
The validation on a Contact in JoinMe makes the Mobile Phone Number Mandatory. So the programmer seems to have assumed you only every make mobile to mobile calls… I worked around this by copying the fixed number to the mobile field and if that wasn’t available just inserting 0

When attempting to Synch with Outlook 2003 it allowed 34 of my 500+ contacts and then JoinMe Crashed. I think the cause was that Outlook allows many number formats (e.g. (02) 5555 5555, 6841-7651 etc) but JoinMe is _very_ picky (see below for my work-a-round)

When I attempted an Outlook Synch the Items that did go accross were automatically assigned to the “Family” category, however unless I have been severely misled about my paternity, I don’t think the ATO is a member of my family.

When Attempting to export from Outlook and synching using CSV I observed that phone numbers with spaces e.g. 0428 555 666 fail but numbers without spaces e.g. 0428555666 work. Note: If you use Microsoft Excel to edit your CSV removing the spaces in phone numbers can cause a problem because Excel then recognizes it as a number and strips leading zeros, making the number incorrect.

To get the correct Import format for JoinMe I exported a single existing contact as CSV from JoinMe

In the end I got most of my Contacts over to my phone but had to manually adjust all the phone numbers to allow it. Which is naff.

Conclusion: JoinMe software isn’t ready for use in a business environment.

2 Comments

  1. Milos

    Please fix this asap. I can’t get all my contacts in!

    Reply
    • james

      I have posted this information in the ZTE forums so hopefully the ZTE people (The makers of the T106) will have a word to their developers about it. But due to the budget nature of the phone I wouldn’t hold your breath.

      Reply

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

The reCAPTCHA verification period has expired. Please reload the page.

You May Also Like…

Squarespace Image Export

To gain continued access to your Squarespace website images after cancelling your subscription you have several...

MySQL 8.x GRANT ALL STATEMENT

-- CREATE CREATE USER 'tgnrestoreuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'AppleSauceLoveBird2024'; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON...

Exetel Opt-Out of CGNAT

If your port forwards and inbound and/or outbound site-to-site VPN's have failed when switching to Exetel due to their...