So we’ve had all hype and the pundit’s views on the iPad this week but the giffgaff team have just had a fish and chip lunch and announced their non pundit  verdicts…..and they’re not good.

So here are some of the downsides that were circulating round the table….

Poor memory capacity, no Flash player (what? You can’t claim the best browsing experience without that surely?), a SIM card format no one has heard of, not as good for reading books as a “proper” e-reader, locked to the Apple book store, locked to Apple’s chosen network partner,  no camera, no USB port and an inability to upgrade hardware and replace the battery.

There are of course the unsaid upsides of “being cool” and the neat UI eye candy. The price would be an upside too if the dollar price translated into pounds using a real world exchange rate – but the likelihood of that is about as high as Apple ever  conducting market research.

The concept is spot on – an easy to use, portable, big screen computer – but it only comes just the way that Apple want it to, serviced by a book store and network provider they choose.

It’s much the same with many other smartphones - Blackberries, Palms etc but what is smart about it? Hasn’t the web itself – the thing all these devices purport to access in the best possible way – taught the world that open standards and customer engagement are the best ways to breed the best services – would Wikipedia, Tripadvisor and the like be here now if the people that built the web tried to control what went on it?

Many of these companies would argue that bundling the applications with the device gives them extra revenue streams that ultimately allows them to sell the device at a cheaper price – they may well be right but that doesn’t erase the fact that what they are doing, in a small way, is limiting personal freedom. Why shouldn’t we all have the right to be able to use a device which we have paid for in the way we want to?

An alternative economic argument is that bundling services and devices in a restricted way reduces competition and that in turn helps to keep prices higher than they would otherwise be.  That’s clearly the argument that has won the day in some countries such as France where only selling locked devices is illegal.

So why don’t you tell us what you think and vote on whether device manufacturers should be allowed to restrict how we use their wares – just click here.

On Monday, the giffgaff team moved into new offices in the picturesque town of Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. The building we’re in is a beautiful timber-framed converted rectory, in the heart of Beaconsfield Old Town and dates its origins back to the 16^th Century.

We were previously based in O2's offices in Slough and the new environment will help us continue to develop our own strong sense of culture and identity. The biggest change is that we’ve gone from a large open-plan arrangement, to a number of creative spaces throughout the building. There are many excellent reasons for choosing Beaconsfield as our location, just look at our wonderful new neighbours such as Angelina Jolie, isn't that reason enough?

In the building there's a communal meeting room, kitchen (complete with awesome new coffee machine) and a welcome area where guests can work on sofas, in front of a grand fireplace. There's a very open and warm feel about the space and there's a real sense of how exciting it will be to work here. The team has been settling in and getting to know the town well, including the local pub (we can strongly recommend the food).

I’ve uploaded some pics, so you can check out giffgaff’s new home for yourself. As you'll see, we still need to 'giffgaff' it with branding and get some art on the walls, but at least we're in!

So, what do you think of our new digs?

Feel free to send us any housewarming presents.

Rob

Here's our first video review, featuring Google's new Nexus One phone. We hope you enjoy!

Rob

Many giffgaffers have posted comments on our forums, blog and twitter talking about how happy they are to have free Internet with us until the end of May.Yes, we are quite proud of being the only mobile network offering free Internet but best value is sometimes not enough. What about our fair usage?

To help put things into context I thought it was important to understand what we mean by "fair usage". I’ve been through the T&Cs of all our competitors (so you don't have to...) and tried to check their limits for free or unlimited Internet:

• Vodafone is not offering a free Internet bundle or reward. They charge it at 50p per day up to a maximum of 25MB.
• Orange allows you 500MB per month with their Dolphin plan.
• T-Mobile gives you 40MB per day with their “free texts and Internet for life” top-up reward.
• Virgin goes up to 1GB per month.
• 3-Mobile gives you 150MB for every top-up until it runs out.
• O2 does not specify what their fair usage is.  

So what's giffgaff's limit? 100MB per day! Yuhhuuuu! This roughly equates to:

• Visiting 2.000 websites a day.
• Checking your facebook home page 6.000 times a day.
• Tweeting 96.000 times a day. That is more than a Tweet per second for 24 hours!

Just watch out with your downloads, YouTube and Spotify usage and you're unlikely to reach that daily 100MB limit. Happy surfing giffgaffers.

Your giffgaff SIM card is pretty clever. Yes, it gives you free data until May and great quality calls and texts matching the UK’s lowest prices, but it’s also capable of a lot more too. If you’re anything like us and love to head off to the slopes for a bit of skiing action, there are some great apps that you can use with your giffgaff SIM card, to track your off-piste prowess.

One example is SportsDo (www.sportsdo.net), an app that you can download on to a compatible mobile that delivers real-time readings, such as speed and distance travelled during your time on the slopes. Back at the chalet, you can also transfer your stats to a PC and play out your route on Microsoft Virtual Earth. You can even broadcast your activities to the web portal, so that envious friends and family can see what you’ve been up to - can anyone say ‘après ski’?.

The app works on Window or Java-based handsets that either have built-in GPS, or can be combined with a small GPS device that you can connect via Bluetooth. You can use their free trial to make sure it works correctly with your setup.

Let us know of any other sporting apps for your mobile that you can recommend.

Lots of excitement here today as we’ve just sent out our first Payback statements – that’s our scheme for rewarding the members that have helped giffgaff.  

I spoke last week about the fantastic level of involvement we’ve had on our forums and that’s been reflected in the Payback points earned by our members – the top contributors were awarded nearly 4000 points for their efforts in December which will be worth £40 when Payback points are converted to cash in May.

We’ve also had a good start to our Send a SIM programme – by sending a SIM card to a friend members can earn 500 points for every SIM that activates and their friends get a £5 airtime bonus too.

If you want to get involved its easy – just visit our payback pages to see what you can do and how many points you can earn.

And finally….. our Google Nexus One handset arrived today. Initial impression is pretty good – especially if you use gmail to run your life. Look out for our video review next week.

So... we're a mobile company with no call centre.....d'uh?

Well here’s a thought:  if call centres are so important for customer service why do so many of us hate calling them?

Yes, call centres can work well - like the one that fixed my Dyson at the weekend (long story), but they are no longer the only way to provide premium support. And they are often not even the method of choice for customers. Too often a call centre experience means hearing "please select from the following 9 options"; then long minutes of orchestral Coldplay followed by  “Your call is important to us. All of our agents are busy.  Please hold for the next available agent..”

And when you do get to speak to someone, often you won’t get the answers you need. Especially in a field like Mobile Services where technology advances so fast and spreads so widely that it’s impossible for even well trained call centre staff to know everything (like whether the SONY T610 needs an https or a plain http WAP gateway to enable GPRS for instance).

We believe there is a better way – one that’s cheaper for us to run (which means lower prices for you) and yet also gives a high level of service that will often be more informed, more useful, and more accessible  than you could get from a call centre.

The key is to make use of the expertise and helpfulness out there already in the giffgaff member community, 24/7. No one person needs to know everything, instead we can tap the specific knowledge and passion of hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of individuals. All we do is provide ways to bring it all together. And, unlike any other mobile service provider, we reward members for helping out - by awarding Payback Points that can be redeemed for cash twice a year.

Here’s how it works. Whenever you have a query or problem there are 3 ways to get an answer:

1)      Find it in our forum. The forum is where members post questions and other members provide the answers... 24/7. You can find the forum by clicking on Community.  It’s best to start by typing your question into the search box to see if your question has already been answered. Or you can go directly to the relevant board. Ask the Community is the main section and has hundreds of help and support topics, while Top Tips has great guides created by members.

2)      Find it in our knowledge base. This is the section of the site called giffgaff answers . It’s a database of information organised in a question and answer format like the FAQ s you’ll see on other sites. We are constantly updating and adding to this base of information, including adding information provided by giffgaff members. You can browse giffgaff answers 24/7 by clicking the category listing; or you can search  for a specific question by entering your search term on the Support homepage.

3)      Contact a giffgaff agent. Once you've ordered a SIM you can send confidential queries e.g.  billing or payment details, to one of our small team of advisors by logging into giffgaff.com, clicking Support and then clicking the Ask an Agent link. We have a turnaround time of 24 hours for queries sent this way, and you can keep track of everything you’ve asked and what we’ve replied in the messages section of Support. The giffgaff agents also browse the forum and help out sometimes by giving definitive answers to questions  that are getting bogged down.

So much for the theory, but is it working? Yes. Like a charm. So far we have had hundreds of queries raised in the forum and only two have been escalated to our agent team because they didn’t get answered quickly enough. And the more questions that get answered the greater the likelihood you’ll find your answer in seconds rather than waiting on the phone. Plus, the average time to get an answer to a brand new question in the forum is about 7 hours, which is way ahead of the industry benchmark of 20 hours; and many questions are answered much faster.

Not only that, some of our members have already gone above and beyond by creating brilliant support material without any prompting by us. Check out this ‘guide to getting giffgaffed’ which was created by member bigfatbball2. Or this guide to unlocking created by ethani99. It's not surprising then that 20% of our registered users actively participated in the forum in the 6 weeks between launch and the end of 2009 (compared to an industry benchmark of 1%).

This is one reason why we prefer the term Member Service rather than Customer Service, because when you want an answer you don't have to listen to muzac, and you don't speak to a stanger in call centre - you are helped by another member with a giffgaff SIM just like you. That’s real people power.

Robbie Hearn

Chief of Member Experience

It’s a new year and there’s lots new things happening at giffgaff already – especially for our community of members.

We launched our “send a SIM ” feature just before Christmas and this was a big step for us as a business. Being people powered is about giving our members opportunities to help grow and run giffgaff – so now if you like what we do you can send your friends one of our SIMs.

The great thing is that in addition to being able to call for free between you and your friend, your friend gets a £5 airtime gift from giffgaff and you get 500 Payback points worth £5 too.

There’s been a bit of debate on our forum about why ALL new members can’t get the £5 – there are two reasons for this. First off – if we gave it to everyone then there would be some folks who would be tempted to order a new SIM every time the £5 ran out – clearly not smart business for giffgaff! Secondly – we really wanted to make these friend SIMs easy for our members to recommend – and we think it’s great if our members can offer potential new customers a better deal than giffgaff can!

Over Christmas we’ve been working hard on preparing our first Payback update where we’ll be telling all our members how many Payback points they earned in December. We’ve been really encouraged by the involvement we’ve had from our members – over 20% have been actively involved in the community areas of our website. The industry benchmark for involvement is only 1% so we’re really pleased that our community approach has been proven to be really resonating with our members.

In fact everywhere I look I’m seeing examples of where the community is really making a difference – here’s an example. Recent legislation has brought down the cost of roaming calls in the EU – but what we had missed is that the European Free Trade Association countries had mirrored the initiative – and this had led us to price roaming calls higher in these countries than we needed to. So thanks to the feedback from andy0 we’re now making plans to reduce roaming prices in Switzerland, Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein to be in line with the lower EU rates.

We’re continuing to build up our resources for the community too – in January we’ll be releasing ideas management and voting features – so community generated ideas can be managed properly and the community itself can vote on what the best ideas are. We’ve also grown the giffgaff team to include a dedicated community manager – Vincent Boon has joined the team from Sony (where he managed the European gaming forums). He’ll be making sure the forum continues to be an interesting place to be and that we continue to listen closely to what’s being said there.

Mike

We’d like to introduce you to a few more giffgaff-staffers; the small yet needed member service staff – those friendly folks that deal with your issues and queries. And again, we’ve also included a LKF (Little Known Fact) to make it a bit more personal. So please join me in welcoming the member service team:

Conor Tasker-Lynch, Customer Service Administrator:

Conor previously worked with MasterCard, on the Tuxedo project. Conor’s typical line of work to begin with was in Human Resources but he gladly jumped ship in Sept 09, in the early days of giffgaff to help set-up. Conor is now a team leader and our back bone for the giffgaff customer service team. LKF: Conor has a strange habit of losing his shoes when he goes out? And then finding them in the strangest places like the roof of his house.

Shaun McGrory, Customer Service Administrator:

Shaun started off as a customer service advisor working for SKY TV. He was then promoted to Team Leader and in Sept 09, while giffgaff was still in its infancy; Shaun was asked to join giffgaff, knowing little about it but wanting a new challenge. He is now a team leader for our giffgaff customer service team just like Conor. LKF: Shaun has an older brother (Nicknamed Fats) that was knocked down by an Ice-cream van. We kid you not.

Nigel Campbell, Trainer/Customer Service Advisor:

As well as being a trainer, Nigel is also another customer service advisor helping you with your queries. He previously worked as a trainer for Sky TV but has gladly come across to join the rest of us here at giffgaff. He’s our computer guru in the team and knows anything worth knowing about forums. LKF: Some say he was born in the Matrix, and that he can only read the giffgaff forum in binary…Yes…it’s the Megatron! (His Nickname)

Simon Barrow, Customer Service Advisor:

Simon was spotted a few months back as a great Sky TV agent, and so, after a few tests, got the chance to come across to giffgaff, as one of two new agents. As an agent, he felt at ease talking to Sky customer’s and could have talked all day. LKF: He was once referred to as Silver Tongue by a Sky customer because his ability to talk and talk – a nickname that just happened to stick.

Danielle Travers, Customer Service Advisor:

Danielle, the only girl at customer services, again, was doing great as an agent for Sky TV and so, after doing a few tests, alongside Simon, got the opportunity to come across to giffgaff. She, like the others, is one of those people that are making your journey with giffgaff as smooth as possible. LKF: The highlight of Danielle’s Christmas was getting a Marmite bear – not her laptop or Sat Nav, but her Marmite bear (a little teddy bear holding a tub of marmite!?)

We'll have more postings on member services for you soon.

Rob