Vodafone Music has disastrous relaunch

Vodafone's free music promotion last week saw overloaded servers, compatibility problems and customers getting billed - all of which bodes badly for the operator's upcoming 360 service. Vodafone Music relaunched on Friday with a new client application and a promotional offer of ten free tracks - at least for customers who had …

[twelvebore]

Website bad anyway

The Vodafone website is *always* slow, particularly the account management side of it. It never ceases to amaze me how tech- and comms-oriented businesses can be so blind to the problems and how bad it makes them look. They spend millions sponsoring Lewis Hamilton to improve their brand image, then slap that same brand image over a website that feels like it's running on a 386.

[Ozwadi Ogolugi]

Phones

They should just stick to flogging phones and hurry up and get the iPhone sorted to save me from O2..

[adam payne]

How to not plan a launch

If you launch a new service you should expect the site to have lots of people going on it and doubly if you're offering something for free.

Instead of launching new sites why can't they just fix their billing?

[Dawid Lorenz]

Agree

I must agree with twelvebore (first comment) here. I think Vodafone has quite bad website and indeed their account management side is on of the worst I've been using so far. Although I only keep a copule of pay-as-you-go numbers with them, and maybe pay monthly users get better experience (doubt it), I can already tell it's a piece of crap.

T-Mobile, on the other hand, is constantly improving its My T-Mobile section, and although it's not perfect, I'm getting nicely surprised every now and then when I can see new features implemented on the site...

[slackshoe]

Agreed about Vodafone's website.

It is an utter mess. Impossible to find anything you're looking for on there.

[Anonymous Coward]

Firmware upgrades slow too

Some months ago Nokia's software told me there is a firmware upgrade available for your Vodafone mobile it but then the 'make sure you don't disconnect as you could turn your phone into a brick' type message keeps changing to an error message when you try to upgrade.

In the end I had to disconnect - fortunately the phone still works, and on checking this out with Vodafone, I find out that whilst Nokia have upgraded the firmware on the 5800, Vodafone had to modify the firmware first before we can have it so Nokia's software shouldn't really tell me there is an upgrade available. As far as I can tell, this involves putting a logo on the loading screen and making sure you can only use the phone with a Voda sim.

From what I gather other companies have have sorted this upgrade out and even Vodafone in other countries as well as PAYG UK customers can upgrade their 5800 firmware. However, some months on we still wait for this upgrade. Checking the dates of the last firmware release and Voda contract UK customer's release, I see it took them some months before.

All this faffing about with music and other activities probably explains why their development team have had no time to devote to their current customer base.