Talk's Not Cheap On The Run

Talk's Not Cheap On The Run

The Age

Thursday September 25, 2008

Charles Wright

A hands-free car phone speaker for the spouse tested Charles Wright's finance defences.

WE'RE PRETTY sure that the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz would have been aghast at our decision to install a Blue Ant Supertooth 3 hands-free speaker in the spouse's car. That single act exposed the vulnerability of our defences against Telstra MobileNet's unrelenting attacks on the Bleeding Edge bank account.

As readers may recall, we'd managed to penetrate the fortifications guarding the existence of Telstra's top-secret capped plans from most forms of assault, which stopped the monthly slaughter. Most customers are completely fooled by Telstra's marketing camouflage and are little more than cannon fodder.

They fall for claims of "bonus options that could save you thousands of dollars a year", "monthly credits that help you reduce your bill each month" and "fantastic call rates to help keep your costs to a minimum". At that point, they're bundled into captivity at rates that are many times higher than the capped plans.

It took several months for Bleeding Edge intelligence officers to break the customer service representatives who are trained to reveal nothing but their name, rank, and standard mobile phone contracts, but once we got them talking we were able to cut several hundred dollars from our monthly bills. For a while it looked like the 3g Cap 79 Business Mobile Plan, which promised to give the Bleeding Edge spouse $450 worth of mobile calls plus $100 worth of calls to Telstra mobiles, would cut her bill to $78.99 a month.

We knew we'd have to be cautious because Telstra has laid a treacherous minefield that can decimate $550 much more efficiently than its mobile competitors. The fact that the armour-piercing bullets fired by the Telstra cap, which charges in 30-second increments rather than per-second increments, plus depleted uranium rounds of 35c flag fall and call rate of 30c a minute, blow a 70c hole in your flak jacket for the briefest conversation. Talk for eight minutes and you'll lose $5.96 worth of blood. We should have remembered that before we installed the Supertooth 3. At about $130, the price is good and it looks innocent enough: a small device that clamps magnetically to a slim clip (you get two of them) on the sun visor.

It has a remarkably efficient text-to-speech engine that looks up your phone book, which it downloads from your mobile phone when you pair it, when you have a call. It even tells you from which of their numbers your contact is calling. If it doesn't find a match it tells you the caller's phone number.

You can answer calls simply by muttering, clearly, "OK," "Accept" or "Answer." We're possibly not the typical mobile phone user, but in our opinion it would be good to have a feature that rejects the call immediately when you say "Buzz off!"

If your phone supports voice calling, you can also instruct the Supertooth 3 to place calls for you. Speech quality is excellent and it works well with most modern phones, although with some models it may take a little coaxing to swallow your contact book whole. If your phone's address book doesn't have the ability to select all contacts, however, you're going to have to transfer them individually. We'd recommend checking your phone's compatibility with Blue Ant's customer service centre on

(03) 9593 6700.

The interface is simple; you can pair the phone with up to eight phones, and depending on how talkative you are, the battery could last from two to three weeks without recharging. Vibration-sensing technology drops the connection with the phone when you leave the car, avoiding those irritating situations where you're standing outside the car with an apparently dead phone, and the caller is communicating with the hands-free inside the car. When you're in the car again, it shakes itself back to life.

One weakness: having a device like that made it so much easier for the Bleeding Edge spouse to slip behind the wheel and start making calls with no risk of being booked by a friendly law-enforcement officer.

Indeed, our significant other seems to have a rare condition in which proximity to a steering wheel sparks a compulsion to ring somebody - anybody - and start chatting. Before we knew it, our anti-Telstra defences were being peppered with holes.

We've had to send out for reinforcements. One of our new recruits is a service called Freshtel Mobile, from the Melbourne-based VoIP operator. It allows anyone with a Nokia E or N series phone to make much cheaper calls using wifi. We'll be looking at that in greater detail shortly. Unfortunately, it doesn't solve the in-car call problem. So we're working on Plan B. We plan to find out how to program in some instructions for the Bleeding Edge spouse. Every 30 seconds, we want the Supertooth 3 to give her a two-word command: "Hang up!"