I was given one of these as a present, and wonder how it can be reset back to its factory settings.

I know on the E2 when starting up you hold the stop and handsfree button, but this does not appaer to work on the E3, anyone have any ideas?

Is this the machine that runs up a large phone bill?

Yes it is, and its going back!

Its a disgrace, if you dont connect once every 24hours, they actually disable the machine so you can't even make a call on it.

We had the Emailer V3 and we're getting rid of it now.
It dials up to get adverts at night which i doubt is a free number?
Plus it'll get disabled if you dont use it within a period of time.
If you wanted to email you can do it on the computer and not get charged a local phone call rate for sending one each time.

From what I rememeber the phone is heavily subsidised to the consumer. The adverts fund the cost of the phone. You would think that this should only be allowed to go on for maybe 12 month after which the advertising should have paid for the phone subsidy.

I got the phone as a present and simply thought I could use it as a phone, but you cannot evem do that as they disbale the phone function, so you cant make calls

It makes a minimum of one call a day which cost typically 17p

Thus per year 0.17 * 365 = £62.05

You can make it dial more often if you want an even higher phone bill

Also when it downloads software upgrades etc these are also via a 090 number.

When it dials for adverts this is an 0808 number and thus is typically free.

These calls seem to be about 8 minutes in length and are dialled in the early hours of the morning.

They do however make these charges failry clear on the box and they claim this is because the phone has a £300.00 value.


Note:
The early model only had to make a call a week and thus is a lot cheaper to run.

Automan.

People managed to find a way of making the original boxes dial out less frequently too.

Yes, sorry I did not make myself very clear.

I did not mean early E3 emailers dialled less often but the previous models did.

e.g. emailer plus ftp://ftp.amstrad.co.uk/emailerplus_userguide.zip
emailer classic ftp://ftp.amstrad.co.uk/emailer_userguide.zip

E3 Manual BTW is at ftp://ftp.amstrad.co.uk/e3_userguide_web_v1.zip

Automan.

I saw one of these for sale in a post office in Cardiff in early December they were selling em off for £29.99 i was going to get one for my folks but in the end didnt bother.

I saw them for around £13-15 (can't remember which) in Tesco the other day.

Yeah, I saw them too for £15 in Tesco and Asda.

I still wouldn't be tempted to buy one, even at that price.

They weren't a bad idea a few years ago, but now, with PCs being so cheap, they seem too out of date.

I would never have one, even if they were free.