Question: Charging Pre-Paid cards

Roger Wilco · 28-08-2008, 06:31 AM

Hello Girls and Boys,

We have a couple of HTC Touch in the office and they travel a bit from time to time.
The home network is Indian (Airtel) and post-paid.
No problems here.

Now one of my colleagues spent some time in Europe and tried to use the phone with pre-paid cards.

This worked alright but it was impossible to charge credit to it.

All in all there 3 SIM cards in use:
One Belgian and two Italian cards. (all different networks)

None of those accepted the secret recharge codes.
For example you enter the code “#12345…” the computerized voice repeats something like: you entered #45578…# in any case something completely different and of course the codes weren’t accepted.

Since this happened to me once with a European Pre-paid SIM and TyTN (and I got around the problem by using an SMS service which accepted the correctly entered code the way it was) I thought it must be the SIM card.

Having now 3 SIM cards on one phone with 100% failure this somehow made me think that the phone isn’t working correctly.

So the questions of course are:

Is this a known problem
- with this phone?
- With Windows Mobile based Phones?
- With certain version of Windows Mobile?
- anything else?

What could possibly cause this problem?

Is there a solution?

Thanks for enlightment,

Bassey · 28-08-2008, 08:51 AM

I've never heard of this before. It does sound as if the device is sending the wrong pulse tones down the line but I thought this was an international standard.

Sorry, no help. I haven't got a clue. I've always topped up online or via SMS.

firstbuddha · 28-08-2008, 02:03 PM

just do a quick check, with Phone, OPTIONS
Check "keypad" - mine is set to "Short tones".

See if that makes a difference.

Sorry I can't be of any more help

Roger Wilco · 29-08-2008, 08:00 AM

Thanks.
it's set to "short tones"
We don't know if that will make a difference as we are now in India and cannot test any of the european networks (afaik).
The original question is mainly to find out if this is a common/known problem.
Apparently not.

but maybe somebody else come up with something...