Posts by Hmpty McNumpty 4 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2010
The package is called Mini-Melf and yes you do see them, quite a lot in fact. However you are just as likely to see a signal diode in an SOD-323 package, depends which one your designer plopped onto first when cruising Farnell I guess.
Interesting to me as a Surface Mount Tech is that on this mixed technology board there are a bunch of SM Electrolytic's, even today they can cost quite a bit more than their PTH counterparts.
Don't be bloody silly, smart phones are perfectly @ home on PAYG tariffs from every provider, I've just gone and looked, and indeed ordered SIM's from all of them. In most cases you do need to add some kind of data package if you want more than FriendFace access, but in all cases its a damn sight cheaper than the £25+/month a contract would entail. As one of those people who has no idea how normal 9-5 working people justify this kind of expenditure on something they did just fine without 10 years ago, PAYG is the only option that makes any sense. The problem here seems to be what O2 is charging when you don't have the tariff or bolt-on activated that gives you some data, it's downright evil. By contrast T-Mobile is £1/day or £20 for 6 months (40mb a day, plenty if you aren't a youtube addict), three is 30p/meg if you haven't topped up in the last 90days or have used more than 150Mb, Virgin is 30p/day for 25Mb etc. O2 has no such scheme in place so if you screw up your bolt-ons/ top-up 2 days late etc, you get screwed.
Yup, I have this issue. Last week my Web & Wifi bolt-on expired and I felt no urge to top up right away as like many people I mostly use my home and work WiFi. Overnight £3 of my balance vanished, presumably used by Push Technology?
The WAP Message came up every 20seconds or so and continued for 12 hours or so after the Web and Wifi bolt-on was restored. After the suggested reboots, resets etc mooted on the interwebs, these have reduced in number, but one week on they still sporadically appear, especially @ work in Deepest darkest Mid-Wales where there is no 3G network.
My solution is to give O2 another £15 to unlock the phone and leave their crumby network, hopefully to Three, who give you a perfectly acceptable 150Mb whenever you top-up £5, which is frankly plenty for finding the nearest KFC and checking the weather ;).
It's all to easy to forget that that these phones suck data even when you are not using them, I certainly did. My issue is not with the £3 that went poof, but the 3000 times I've had to tap dismiss! Can't understand how you'd burn through £90 as described in the forums tho', if you need to top-up your prepay that much, you need a contract.
And yes as another has posted, iOS4 gives all compatible iPhones the Cellular data switch (was it really not there before?).
Also the message is NOT a text message, it doesn't appear in your inbox, I believe its a WAP Push.
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