I am breaking up ...

Yes... after 15 months together, I have decided to call it quits. This relationship is no longer working for me. I can't cope with the empty promises and the unreliability anymore.

Yes... this is the end for us... Mr Yellow Man!


I dunno, perhaps I just got tired of you. Tired of getting all the SMSes telling me that I have missed calls from this number or that number although my phone was turned on at all times. Tired of getting my conversation cut off abruptly when I was travelling along my usual route to and from work. Tired of receiving all the spam messages EVERY morning.

You used to be much better. I was happy with you for a while... and then things changed. Was it me? ... Was it you?...

Perhaps it's also because there is a someone else... someone in blue called Celcom. I know they can be pretty sucky too but at least their reception is much better than yours! At least I could still text in my office's toilet!

Also, they are too seductive to resist with this:

So although I am having you both now... it's a matter of time when I make our breakup official (i.e. after I get a chance to go to one of those DiGi centres).

Goodbye Mr Yellow Man (aka DiGi).

DiGi's booth in Midvalley

I came across DiGi's roadshow at Midvalley Megamall this weekend. I thought the booth's setup was really interesting... as if you're in a very YELLOW cartoon world.





Sorry my phone's camera didn't do the booth justice.

DiGi Tariff Transparency

DiGi rolled out this new feature which enables you to check whether the number you are going to call to is a DiGi subscriber or not.

You just need to send a SMS with the message "Check <10 digit phone number>" to 2000 and DiGi will reply telling you whether that number is a DiGi subscriber or not... and the best of all, it's a free service. How cool is that?? Click here for more info.

However as DiGi's tariff is flat across all numbers no matter which service provider you are calling to, I don't actually see the point of this. Hmm...maybe you can use this to determine who you can add into your "Friends and Family" list. Only DiGi subscribers can be added into this list and you get charged lower when calling or SMS'ing them.

I think Maxis should have something like this for their subscribers as they get charged higher if they call to other service providers.

My affair with the yellow man - Part 2

First and foremost, I need to clarify that I am not in anyway been paid by DiGi for my posts on them. In fact, I have not earned a single cent through my blog so far... pathetic I know, but then again that was not at all my intention when I started this blog. If I get to earn some along the way, that's great... if not, I am fine too. I guess this blog is more of "syok sendiri" for myself. :-)

Now, back to my affair with the yellow man. I have just gotten my first bill with DiGi, meaning that it has been a month since I switched from Maxis to them. My bill... RM76.12 and this is including the one time Stamp Duty charge of RM10. So if I minus that off, my usage last month was only about RM66. With my previous service provider, my total bill was always above RM84. Quite some savings, right?

Oh and I finally got my first batch of bonus points. For every RM1 spent with DiGi, you'll get 1 bonus point that you can accumulate. After you've accumulated enough points, you can use them to redeem vouchers or to offset your bill amount. For my first month's bill, they gave me 573 bonus points! I am not complaining and if it's a mistake, I hope DiGi will not take them back. If they do, I guess I will need to write a bad post about them, hehe.

So far I am really happy with my new service provider. They gave me the feeling that they are young (oh, I sooooo need to feel young), fun and innovative. On top of that, I feel I am very much appreciated for being their patron. Also, I have no complaints on the coverage.

With all these, I am slowly becoming (hmm... I think I may have already became) the yellow man's stalker, as I check out their website and related forums EVERYDAY! They do come out with many promotions, something that I cannot say for my previous service provider.

Yellow is definitely one of my favourite colours now.

With Chinese New Year around the corner, I just can't help but to remember this TV Commercial:

Change Operator Logo on your WM device

With my current obsession with DiGi and my staying home during the Sultan Selangor's birthday, I discovered from some forums that I can customise the operator logo that appears on my LG KS20 PDA phone. Before this, it was only appearing as "DiGi" in a text format. I wanted to "glam" it up a little bit.

And now, it looks like this:

It's really simple to do this but bear in mind that this only applies to Windows Mobile devices. My phone is in WM6 and I believe it should also work for WM5 and WM6.1. Not sure about the other versions of WM.

Firstly, you need to create a picture with the height of 20 pixels. As for the length, it can be any length that is less or equal to 120 pixels. After you have created this picture, save it as "carrierlogo.gif". (If you like mine, you can get it here)

Then save this picture to your WM device's Windows directory. After that, soft reset your device and you should see your new operator logo!

P/S I am not sure whether the same logo will be displayed when you switch your SIM card to another service provider's or when you roam in other countries. I think it will stay the same. Anyhow if you know, tell me!

My affair with the yellow man - Part 1

Initially I thought I will do this post a week after I switched my telco service provider from Maxis to DiGi. However as I had too much of chinese tea during my niece's birthday dinner just now, I am still very wide awake... at 2.30 in the morning. Thank goodness it's a public holiday, else I will suffer again at work. So while waiting for the chinese tea's effect to wear down, I am going ahead to share what I think about DiGi's services... 5 days after I switched.

I know when it comes to network coverage, DiGi falls behind Celcom and Maxis. I have read from forums about how certain areas are having difficulties getting its services. I don't have much complain about that... yet. For me, what matters most is the coverage at my office and at home, the 2 locations that I spend most of my time in... and I have been getting full bar there. I may sound very naive here but I kept telling myself, their coverage shouldn't be so bad la... after all, they came out with this advert whet:


Anyhow, I love the customer service from DiGi. I tell you, I have been contacting them like hundred times since I switched and each time I got a pleasant experience. Don't get me wrong, the reason I contacted them most of the time was to find out more about their products and services; you know like what I can do with my current plan, what gets charged and what doesn't etc. They even have this chat program called D'Chat that lets you instant message their Customer Support! I remember one time I made a complain to them via this channel and before the session ends, their representative already called me to find out more information on the problem that I have just reported. I was so impressed!!

Then there is this free access *128# that you can use from your phone to check your account such as your balance, mobile services, change features etc. It's free! Can you believe that?!

I have also experimented with the Multi-Party Conferencing feature that came automatically with my DG50 plan. This feature allows you to connect up to 5 people to the same phone conversation. There is no registration fee but you will be charged based on your plan's rate for these calls as if they are individual calls. I haven't used this much yet but it is certainly very exciting to me.

Oh and there's the "Friends and Family" where you can add up to 6 DiGi subscribers and get much better rate when you call or text them. Sad to say though that I currently only have 2 numbers in that list as most of my friends whom I call often are in another network. Anyhow, it is still good as I never have this type of feature with my previous service provider.

Well based on my 5 days affair with DiGi, these are the good things that I have encountered. So what about the not so good ones?

For one, I think it's quite difficult to find information from their website.

For instance when I was looking for information on their value added services, I found the page but there was no link for more information about these services such as how to use them and what are the charges. When I did a search, the information that I needed was placed in the Prepaid section.

Besides that, there isn't much explanation about their call plans. I am on Postpaid DG50 plan where I need to pay a commitment fee of RM50 per month. In the website, it was stated "Usage commitment fees for DG 50 and DG 150 are inclusive of total usage for all chargeable voice and data services in the bill excluding fixed access fee and Talktime Transfer (Post to Pre) services". What about things like IDD, Roaming or Mobile Lifestyle services such as Caller Tunes? Will all these be considered as part of the commitment fee? I only found out later from forums and upon confirming with their CS that Talktime transfer and Roaming charges will not be deducted from this commitment fee. All others are included.

Aside from the website, I also have problems receiving SMSes from some Maxis numbers. I wonder whether this could be Maxis punishing me for betraying them, hehe. However these numbers did not have any problem receiving SMSes from me. Well I have reported this to DiGi and am awaiting their response.

There is also this problem where when someone from overseas calls me, I get a prefix 012 in their Caller ID. Say a friend from Singapore calls me, I will see my phone displaying the caller's number as +01265XXXXXXXX. Weird right? Feedback from DiGi's CS is that the issue is caused due to during the MNP process, the routing is done through Maxis first before it reaches DiGi. Maxis will put forth 012 as header to the number and on DiGi's side, they are unable to change this settings. I have lodged a report to Maxis. Lets see whether they will entertain me as I am no longer their customer.

All in all, I am happy with DiGi for the time being. I guess I will have to stick to the Yellow Man a while longer to know him better and to see whether this affair will be a long term one. If not, well there's always MNP (Mobile Number Portability) that I can fall back on.

(Images extracted from DiGi website and The Official Website of the Yellow Coverage Fellow!)

I switched to the smarter side

By now, I am sure many of us already know what Mobile Number Portability (MNP) is. MNP is basically the government's implementation that allow you to change your mobile phone service provider without having to change your existing phone number. Well if previously what is stopping you from changing your service provider is the hassle of informing people about your new mobile phone number; then this is no longer a concern.

I made use of the beauty of MNP today. All this while I have been using Maxis and although I don't think it sucks big time, I don't seem to get anything from my loyalty to them. I do find their spams rather irritating at times but I heard Celcom users had it even worse. Well..and then there is this complaint I made numerous time to them which until now has yet to be resolved. This is on the problem where although I successfully received a MMS, they will still send me a SMS a few days later informing me that the MMS has failed to be delivered. The most frustrating thing of all is that these SMSes usually come to me after midnight!

So with MNP, I started to make some survey on other service providers. Using my previous month's mobile phone bill, I calculated the cost based on the different rates of different service providers. You can refer here for the rates. Then I found out that with DiGi, my bill is less than with Maxis. The difference is about RM10 leh... and wanting a change, I decided to switch to DiGi.

Off I went to SS2 to carry out this task. Went to Maxis first thinking that I should pay whatever outstanding balance that I have with them. This is very important!!! If you owe them anything, they will refuse to "release" you. After checking with the girl there, I have no outstanding amount, just unbilled amount ... which is okay as they will send me the bill after the due date.

Then I went to DiGi and went through the switching process. It's really simple actually. Just give them your existing phone number and your IC. They will do everything for you. I opted for their postpaid plan DG50. Then they gave me my new SIM card in a little package (front and back) as below:


Well, this SIM card cannot be used yet... not until Maxis confirmed that they will "release" me and DiGi to activate the line. The DiGi person told me the maximum time to wait for activation is 48 hours. I read from forums that the fastest was 24 hours. Guess what? Mine was activated after about 3 hours!!!

So how did I know that mine is activated? Well Maxis sent me a SMS telling me that they have received my switching request and all those thank you and bye bye stuff. Then DiGi sent me a SMS saying that I can change my SIM card.

So after changing my SIM card, I am now a DiGi subscriber.


Well... that remains to be seen actually... whether this move is the smarter side or the dumber side. I will let you know...