I finally got a new mobile this week - a shiny new Nokia 3510, which isn't exactly the same as James's /at all/. Sorry, James!

I charged the battery up, inserted my SIM into it, and began to play around with it. And apart from a few minor annoyances, I came to the conclusion that it was generally much better than my old 7110.

However, when I began texting people on it, I realised that delivery reports weren't set up on it. I went into the various 'Message settings' options on the phone, but couldn't work out how to turn on delivery reports at all. Furthermore, the advice in the 'Guide to using your Nokia 3510' wasn't particularly helpful, directing me to a set of menus that didn't even exist on my phone!

The only helpful bit of advice I managed to glean from the manual was that I could force the system to send me a delivery report by adding the letters 'RCT' to the beginning of the message text, without leaving a space.

But I wasn't too keen on having to keep doing this for /every/ damn message, because (a) it was a load of extra hassle, (b) it reduced the number of characters I had available for the message text, and (c) the delivery report came back as a regular message with a load of useless technical information in it.

The help section of the Orange website referred me to the same non-existent menu option, and so in desperation I phoned up Orange customer services.

Without any waiting, I spoke to a very helpful woman called Jill, who couldn't work out why I didn't have the ability to turn on delivery reports. She explained that she would go and get a 3510 that they had lying around for training purposes, see what she could see in the menu system on that, and call me back.

I went back to my work, fully expecting to have to call back in an hour when the nice lady hadn't phoned back. However, I was pleasantly surprised when after only 5 minutes, I got a call back. She explained that she couldn't find a Nokia 3510, and having discussed the matter with some colleagues, that she'd try a different approach. I explained my situation to her again, and she said that she'd send me a SIM update to hopefully fix my problem.

I finished the phone call, and as I looked at my phone I saw the SMS had already arrived. As directed, I clicked 'read', deleted the message, turned the phone off and removed the battery for ten minutes. It seemed like such a strange thing for me to have to do, and I didn't bear out much hope of it working, but it did! When I turned the phone back on, went into Message settings > Text messages > Sending profile > Default profile (selecting 'Sending profile' took me straight into 'Default profile'), I had seven settings available to me where previously I'd only had three ('Message centre number', 'Default recipient number', and 'Use GPRS'). And sure enough, one of the options was 'Delivery Reports'. I quickly turned them on, and sent myself a message, and it worked! And now I have delivery reports fully set up on my phone!

That's the kind of reason I'm sticking with Orange - the excellent customer service. Of all the customer services departments I've had to phone in my life, I'm pretty sure that's the best service I've had. And considering how little I get away with paying Orange, that's a pretty good deal from my perspective. I may even be willing to increase my expenditure, based on that one positive experience. That's the value of decent customer service.

Unfortunately, James didn't get quite the same response when he had the same problem, and was fobbed off with some excuse about Nokia having disabled delivery reports on all new phones.

I realise that delivery reports aren't exactly essential, and I can manage to send texts without them, but it's really nice to have some kind of confirmation that the message you've just written has actually reached its recipient.

Is there some kind of conspiracy to stop the British public from making use of one of the most useful features of SMS? Aside from mine and James's experiences with Orange, delivery reports have never worked with O2. I experienced this directly too, back in the days when they were still BT Cellnet. And when I phoned up customer services to enquire about this, they said they weren't sure why I couldn't set up delivery reports, and never called me back about it like they said they would.

Apparently you can get delivery reports to work on O2 on a per-message basis, by typing *0# at the beginning of a message (I'm guessing you don’t need a space, again). Yes, I know - it's a pain.

It seems such a shame that support for such a useful feature is beginning to wane, and that when people enquire about this, they are being fobbed off by the operators. To me, it sums up a lot of what's wrong with the mobile operators. Instead of spending billions on buying 3G licenses so they can operate services that not that many people even want, surely it would be better to become more customer focused? It seems to me this is a far better way of increasing the average revenue per user (ARPU) that they're continually harping on about.