Pelephone disappoints in TheMarker Com.Vention
Monday, March 30th, 2009Yesterday I attended TheMarker annual web convention, Com.vention09. when I arrived, a girl approached me and informed me that Pelephone are giving away the Palm. As I’ve been awaiting for the Palm Pre, and knowing that it will distributed via Pelephone, I got super excited and even ready to buy it! When I got to Pelephones stand I asked about it, and after taking a good look at the phone I said; This is not the Palm Pre!
Well, it seems that Pre and Pro sound rather similar. After explaining to the sales person why this phone is not the Pre, he said, “Yes, the Pre will only be available in September” and explained how good is the Palm Pro. Since I was there already, I played a game. I was impressed that Pelephone had such a big stand, and thought to myself that its probably due to the new technology they are marketing : High Speed GSM, which is actually HSDPA (where did they get that name!?!).
At the end of the convention, I went up to meet a friend near the Pelephone stand, One of the girls told me I can play as much as I’d like (woohoo). surprisingly enough, I had won! I was shocked, I have never won before. I went to get my prize, and found out that in order to get my prize I need to sign up to Pelephone for 36 months and pay 70 NIS per month!!!, which is 2520 NIS!!!, doesn’t sound like a prize to me!. After talking a bit with the sales guy he said the problem is that I have a different operators phone and that I need to have a Pelephone subscription in order to be legible for the prize. sounds fair enough. As Pelephone charges me for some unknown reason for the past two years, I was actually happy. I have two numbers subscribed to Pelephone, which I haven’t been using for periods of three and five years yet they’ve been charging me 60 NIS per two months. As me being one of those costumers that don’t want to wait 2 hours on the phone, I just let them charge me 30 NIS a month. finally I thought it was worth it. I could get the phone for 30 NIS a month, and still keep my Orange number. But it seemed that the ONLY package I could get in order to receive my **FREE* phone was the 70 NIS or up packages. It was to expensive to get the free mobile phone. I would actually prefer not to win a FREE phone and get all disappointed. After this incident, I’m going to wait on the phone how ever much it takes and cancel my 2 subscriptions to Pelephone. Although it does say on the small print that you need to subscribe to Pelephone, it does make you feel stupid that they make you pay a big amount and change your subscription package to a more expensive package. Shame on Pelephon!