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I’m going to risk making myself look rather stupid here, but I think it’s for the greater good.  If only one person learns from my mistake… and so on etc blah.

As I think I may have mentioned a few months back, I finally clambered on the bandwagon and got myself one of these iPhone jobbies you may have heard of.  And, in fairness, my period of iPhone ownership to date has been largely enjoyable and trouble-free.  It has not, however, been quite as spectacular as I’d been led to believe.

See, it’s always been quite slow when not connected to Wi-Fi.  I’d always assumed any of a variety of mitigating factors:

• I was in a near-permanent weak-signal area,
• iPhones just aren’t as good as everyone else says they are (in an Emperor’s New Clothes sort of way),
• being the eternal pessimist I often can be, the resignation that whenever I get something I’ve wanted for ages there’s always something wrong with it that’s too minor to completely ruin the experience and too trifling to actually bother sorting out.

I’d always wondered how one particular friend was able to watch Youtube (or more specifically Porn Hub) videos on his phone while they downloaded.  Youtube just didn’t agree with my phone when I wasn’t connected to Wi-Fi, but I assumed that as his wasn’t an iPhone, it was just maybe a better phone than mine, or he was on a better network.

Then, last weekend, came a watershed moment of sorts, sitting in a pub with someone with the same iPhone as me, on the same network as me, he bored me with Youtube clips while my iPhone flashed up “unable to connect” style messages.  Something didn’t add up, so I turned to the only reliable source of information I could think of: the internet.

A quick search revealed other people with similar slow connection problems posting their concerns on forums for other people who used to have similar problems but have now sorted the problems out themselves, to post replies on how they sorted their problems out.

It may be, an internet poster posted, that you have an old SIM card.  You need a 3G SIM card.

Now, call me retarded, but I just sort of assumed that when I bought my iPhone I’d have the appropriate SIM card.  Assumption, as they say, is the mother of all fuck-ups.  I’ve had SIM card, I reckon, for a good seven or eight years, from the early days of my current relationship when we decided we wanted to be on the same network as each other so we could get free mobile-to-mobile calls in the evenings when we, you know, still wanted to talk to each other all the time.

As it turned out, it was a simple thing to sort out.  I went on o2.co.uk and ‘chatted’ with an on-line advisor called James.  I explained my predicament in marginally more succinct terms that I’ve done here, and he checked, said there was no problem with my network connection and yes, it was probably my SIM card that needed replacing.  So, as easy as that, they sent me a new one.

And oh my word is it better.  Well, I haven’t really done much with it to be honest, but, you know, it’s quicker.  And it got me wondering just how many other people out there are paying £35 a month (minimum) for an iPhone but who are missing out on a hell of a lot because they’ve got an old SIM card.

And it got me wondering whether it’s just me.