Very curious. It appears that the Orange SPV trial was / is all a fake. After the news story was spotted on newswireless.net, we reported on it Saturday. Julian Hope, the man purported to be behind the trial, is on holiday at present. In his absence, people emailing Orange have been directed to Neil Ashley. He sends us this email….
“I’ve received a number of emails over the past few days, presumably because Julian Hope’s vacation message suggests contacting me in his absence. Unfortunately, this relates to something in which neither Julian nor myself have involvement. The following statement should clarify the situation;”
A number of Orange customers have received an email which claims to be from Orange inviting them to participate in a trial of the new Orange SPV handset.
While this information appears to have been sent by the Orange trials team, it was not generated by Orange.
The next version of the SPV, the SPV E100 will be launched in the UK in July. WEHAY!! All trials of this handset are now complete.
Orange very much regrets any disappointment caused to our customers by this misleading email and we are conducting a full investigation into its origin.
Thanks to those who also told me of this, including Howard Beaumont who sent some info in too. I’ve received a bit more info about how this came about … click below for more….
This was posted on newswireless.net’s forum earlier today by Ron Walker…
More info: it seems that the original hoaxer joined the Modaco forum on 13th June they did so under the name “SPVlover”, and posted three messages – the original hoax email, another telling people to sign up, a third drawing attention to the mail in another thread, and UNDER ANOTHER NAME (“Chris D”) repeated the scam through a newsgroup synched with Modaco, claiming to have “also recieved the same email”.
All in all, a very busy bunny around teatime on Friday, but also a VERY well planned, slick operation; quite the opposite of the usual hoax profile. This chap was clever, and reasonably well educated. He also looks to be a techie of some kind.
Modaco have been something of a thorn in Orange’s paw for quite some time – while not mentioned by name, Orange have put out press releases denouncing release of instructions on how to “decertify” the phone (it’s “locked” and should ONLY run Orange-approved and licensed software. Unlocked it’ll run it approved or not)If you want to unlock or SIM unlock your SPV, Modaco has long been the place to look. And its membership is now 8000+ – more than 10% of all SPV users worldwide. So, I’m left wondering if this is more than a “jape”; could it be the act of an “Agent provocateur” to give Orange the excuse to take legal action?
Whoever it was, and whyever they did it… they seem to have been aware of Julian Hope’s holiday schedule, and that he’d not be around to rubbish the hoax. How DID they know? Who HAS access to that kind of info?
Well – put it this way… Ron may have a point. Orange have never really contacted me either, and I’m not totally sure whether they appreciate this site or not. OB (Paul @ Modaco) has the biggest Smartphone forum in the planet and it carries a huge amount of users – most of Oranges’ user-base. That said though, I am still not entirely sure why this hoax was generated or what it was seeking to achieve really!?