After months of discussing and debating we have finally made the move to Orcon. I couldn’t be happier. I will give you an outline on how hard it was to change to Orcon.

1. Call Orcon, give them all the relevant details
2. Wait a few days
3. Congratulations, you are now with Orcon!

It was really that simple, nothing went unplanned, it worked perfectly. The hardest part was deciding whether to switch to them or not.

The reason we did decide to switch to them was the horrible and expensive service from Telecom (phone line) and the slow, unstable, annoying broadband from Xnet. Xnet was the main issue for us to switch. On the Geekzone Xnet forums there has been a lot of issues with Xnet in general but more to do with their slow international speed. During peak hours the internet with Xnet came to a grounding halt. YouTube videos took an age to load, nothing could be downloaded. It was practically dial up. Xnet went downhill from there, introducing a Torrent plan which would let users download 80gb of data at off peak hours (12am – 7am). Xnet have still failed to realise their mistake and have lost a lot of customers because of this. Over the past few months frequent outages have occurred, no not just normal ISP outages but the connection being lost every couple of weeks. However we signed up to Xnet for a totally different reason. Xnet was a revolutionary ISP, only charging for gb used, no excess $10 fee and a great customer service. While all those factors have remained they have really been trodden by shocking speed, outages and sheer annoyance.

So like many other Xnet users we spoke with our feet.

We couldn’t be happier that we are with Orcon. On the the Silver+ plan with a 25gb addon for $99.95 a month. This was the same price we paid with Xnet + Telecom but much faster speed, better reliability and more bandwidth.

I’ll give you a small comparison: Xnet vs Orcon: speed.

That’s a huge difference! Also remember that this is international speed, national is much faster. I advise all of you to change to Orcon if you are not satisfied with your current ISP. It’s very easy.

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As mentioned on Engadget and my Twitter status New Zealand is going to be the first place in the world to get the very first 3G iPhone and I’m going to be the very first person in the whole world to have an iPhone (hopefully and maybe). Vodafone is set to open there stores at 12:01am on July 11 in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. I think this is great as New Zealand can finally be the first to get something (remember we never got the first iPhone).

For me the iPhone solves all my problems I have ever had with a phone. I agree with Apple favourite line “it just works”. As it does precisely that. It seems really expensive, especially for the average teenager but really it’s not. If you think about it lets say the iPhone 3G is $500 NZD on contract (Vodafone hasn’t said anything about price and the iPhone won’t be for prepay, will be covered in another blog post). In New Zealand dollars the average mobile phone is $200, the average camera $200, average iPod $350. That already adds up to $750 dollars. Plus the iPhone comes with awesome other features such as GPS, awesome mobile internet, 3G, email that actually works and much more. So it really is worth the money you pay for it.

For me it would be great only having to take one gadget around, my pockets are so full already with a phone, iPod and camera. It would be awesome to have it all in one and that’s exactly what it does.

Now Apple, you’ve done well with the iPhone, and you gave a retail store to Sydney, so when is Auckland’s turn?

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