Like everyone else here, I made the immoral decision to purchase a cheap GPS from a Chinese company with questionable working practices and falsely advertised products and pricing. I got my dues in the end, having to then deal with a Chinese app to actually use my GPS device.
It was disheartening that there was no option to view the app in English, but when you’re selling cheap boxes of plastic for £2 and calling them GPS devices, you’re probably not the type of company to hold an ethos of making the customer experience a pleasant one. But hey ho, I thought, at least I have Google Translate.
So I tried to set up the device. How hard could it be? I probably wouldn’t even need the “instructions” (or lack thereof, as I later surmised). I’m one year away from graduating as a mechanical engineer, I think I should just about be able to operate such a rudimentary device.
Upon charging the device, putting £10 onto a Vodafone SIM card, and inserting the card, I was rewarded with an internal light sensor glowing red for a few seconds. Well, that’s a good start, I thought. Now to upload the SIM card details, and I can be well on my way in tracking the car of a local dealer and photographing his exchanges to then blackmail him for money to use on more Temu GPS devices to run the same op on more dealers and finally become the work-from-home kingpin I always dreamed of- uh I mean to keep geographical tabs on my cat.
And that, my thrifty friends, is where the trouble began. You see, Google Translate is great. It’s near-infallible. It works for all civilised languages. But you know what it doesn’t translate? The absence of text where it should be. Google Translate cannot read minds, unlike Google’s many other you-say-it-we-market-it-to-you-one-minute-later products.
The app requires the SIM card details to identify the SIM and connect it to the user interface. Seems simple enough. Without any form of instructions, I had to navigate through the mandarin to find the settings tab, and click on the one option relating to the SIM. Clicking on it, an immediate pop-up states “Content cannot be empty”. Hm. It was only upon closing this pop up that I was even able to see what they were referring to - a single search bar at the top of the screen.
Now this screen is blank. It simply says SIM, and allows for text input. But what, exactly, am I supposed to input? The mobile number? The ICCID? The number on the back of the SIM card? Couldn’t you be a little more specific? Yeah I’m looking at you, Head of UX department. Learn some basic app development skills would you please?
Bearing in mind the possible expected input numbers are up to 20 characters long, I promptly flexed my fingers, tried not to think about arthritis and went to work typing away. Upon entering any number, a second input appeared. As the placeholder text in the input field, this translated to
“Network card number/ICCID number/IMSI number”
Fan-bloody-tastic. Not only do I have no idea what the initial search bar was for, but now I another thing to input. And it seems to be wants three - two, at best - different things in one entry. ICIID and IMSI are two different things.
It seemed to me that the ICCID was what these indecisive app developers were looking for. I entered it, and received the message
“The card does not exist or has been cancelled. Please check and enter the card information.”
Don’t you hate these “or” error messages? Which one is it? Kind of like “your username or password was wrong”.
Okay so the card with this ICIID certainly exist, in fact it’s sitting in your dumb little plastic product waiting to see some action. Has it been cancelled? Nope, I had just funded it an hour ago. This search bar asked for the ICIID, so I must have put in the correct number, the one they wanted. But no dice.
I tried a few more combinations of numbers, then started to lose the will to live and bought an AirTag instead.
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