I was contacted yesterday by a company representing O2 to answer a few questions on my recent contact with O2 customer services and my opinion of them as an operator. I don’t normally answer calls that come up on my phone as blocked nor do I usually entertain market research calls but O2 have always seen me right so I obliged.

Ironically my signal dropped off and I was disconnected. Since the call was blocked it was up to them to call me back. They didn’t.

So O2 good, survey company bad.

I got a cheap Bluetooth headset at Christmas to use with the PS3 and while it worked it wasn’t very good. It looked and felt cheap, and there was an audible hiss when using it. So when I saw the Official headset back in stock at Gameplay I thought it was worth a punt.

Straight out of the box its much nicer and comes with a USB charging cradle. On the surface its functionality is standard Bluetooth headset but that’s because it comes with great big ‘gotcha’.

The headset can be paired in one of two ways, either by connecting the USB cable to the PS3 or going through a standard wireless discovery pairing. On first look of the booklet there doesn’t seem to be much difference other than ease of pairing and since I had charged the headset from the computers USB ports and didn’t have the cradle attached to the PlayStation I opted for the discovery mode pairing.

Wrong choice.. I then spent the next hour trying the find the battery gauge indicator that I’d seen mentioned in a user review.

If you read the manual again, buried casually in the middle of a preamble text before the detailed pairing steps of the two options, is this text.

“Additional features will be available on your headset when you update the PS3™ system to version 2.5 or higher, but only if you pair using a USB cable.”

Obviously on first read the combination of PS3 and updates caused my brain to skip that part however this is the only mention it gets and in addition to the lack of any other urging you to use a preferred method there is no mention anywhere of what these ‘features’ might be.

The features are in fact the elusive heads up display panel showing headset status such as charge level and volume, but also a HQ mode that delivers crystal clear audio. You’d have thought that it would be worth at least a mention?

I was going to post a few weeks ago about the dark nights drawing in and the lack of light in the mornings. In the end I didn’t. I knew the change was being felt from Tweets and good old fashioned verbal conversations I had with people. I only mention it now as I was driving to work this morning in the dark and I realised that it felt normal and the memory of driving to work in the light was not only a distant memory but felt a distinct novelty.

I suppose that having now made the change I can sit back and enjoy my Halloween and bonfire night before my thoughts turn to Christmas. Yes, Christmas, who could forget? Well not me for a start yesterday while in the Trafford Centre. I don’t begrudge BHS having a Christmas shop but stop with the festive music. Its too early and not right.. ok? The only mix of Halloween, Christmas and music that I’ll entertain is from Mr. Burton’s stable.

At some point way back when I stopped getting emails when people left comments. There was no apparent reason for this and searching the net revealed that I wasn’t alone. One solution was to install Swift SMTP. It did seem to a work but some users were posting comments without me getting a mail and some were getting an error. It may be something to do with the theme or some other reason. Either way I’ve decided that no mail and regular checks for comments is better than horrible errors.

It would be nice to get it working again in the future but I’ll just have to wait for an alternative to come my way.

Thanks EA.. you never cease to amaze me on how annoying you can be