Yay Vodafone - again....

Well, here I am again, more fun & games with Vodafone and my new(ish) phone. I'm heading off to Dubai on saturday, and I won't be able to use my Vodafone SIM card over there as for some reason while Vodafone have roaming agreements with post-paid customers in Dubai, they don't have it for pre-pay (as my parents found out last year). So, I need to buy a pre-pay SIM card in the airport when I go out there and use it for the week. One slight problem tho: my phone is sim-locked so I can't put in a non-Vodafone SIM card.

So, I go to the web page to get the network unlocking code, look up the IMEI, put it in, and get told NAC code cannot be found for IMEI entered (MM-NAC-14). Well, this is Vodafone Ireland, it'd be silly of me to expect it to work first time out, right? So, I try to ring up the cust care. Miracle of miracles, I manage to get a human after about 30secs and only 2-3 "please press 1 for blah" menus! So, I tell her what I was seeing on the web page and stuff, I give her my IMEI, and she tries to look for my unlock code. Guess what? She can't find it, she's getting the same error I am! So, what can I do? Well, they can get the unlock code from Samsung, but it'll take 10 working days. Not much good to me seeing as I'm flying on saturday is it?

So, with my lovely new Samsung phone, I can bring it on hols and take pictures with the 8Mp camera, and I can tell where I am using the GPS (provided I have a map with me so I can interpret the latitude and longitude, as google maps still works by the cell info), but I can't actually do such trivial things as make calls or send txts on it. I mean, why would you want to do stuff like that on a mobile phone? Think I might see how much a sim-free iPhone is in Dubai's tax-free shopping....