Autolamps Cobalt II Blue Headlight Bulbs

Driving along one evening with my lights on I noticed that one of my headlights wasn't working.  So I had a look and as you'd expect the bulb had blown!

I searched around in the shed and found an old H7 bulb that I could use.  I plugged it in and all was good!  However, I thought that the lights were a little dull and compared to the other cars on the road, a bit yellow.
"Hmmm", I thought, "it's time to search the internet for some new headlight bulbs!".  So I fired up the laptop and started Googling!  Ebay, Amazon, Halfords (or as I like to call them Halfrauds), all had bulbs but the bright ones that weren't supposed to be yellow, but a nice white colour, were pretty expensive - circa £30 for a pair!

After a bit more searching I suddenly remembered the Auto Express website, who tend to test out things for cars, like bulbs.  So I headed over to their website and looked for a review of headlight bulbs.
After a short search I found that they had a top three of bulbs Auto Express:
1st place: Philips X-tremeVision,
2nd place: Philips VisionPlus,
3rd place: Autolamps Cobalt II.

The first two were pretty pricey, but probably would have been worth the money.  But I thought the Autolamp Cobalt II bulbs looked good and they were pretty reasonably priced to at £12.95 (including 2 side light bulbs as well).

I headed over to the web site that sold the Cobalt II bulbs, www.phoenixautobulbs.co.uk.  I was a little weary of the site at the start because I'd never heard of them before.  After some thought I decided that they must be OK if they are mentioned on the Auto Express website.  So I ordered two pairs of them, you know just in case a bulb blows in the future and the price has gone up.  It cost £25.90 and the P&P was free!  It says on their website that their standard delivery is free and will take a few days to arrive.  So I was very surprised when on Saturday morning the post man delivered a package with my light bulbs in!!

Like a child at Christmas opening their presents, I ripped through the jiffy bag and pulled out the two pairs of bulbs.  Then headed straight out the front door on a mission to change my bulbs!  Never mind it was 12pm and bright day light!  I plugged them in and tested them out... but I couldn't see much difference.  "O no", I thought, what a waste of money.  Perhaps I'll wait and see what they are like in the dark.

After an agonising wait of a few hours I tried them in the dark!  Can't say they looked much different while in the car.  However, when I got out of the car and looked at them, they did look a lot whiter than the old bulbs I had before.  Not such a waste of money then after all!  Yay!!

Now, a couple of days later I'm topping up the water on my wife's car, as she mentioned a light had come on in the car!  While topping up the water I decided to compare my headlights to her's...
What a difference, I thought I was back in France during the 80s when French cars had yellow headlights!

So I'd recommend the Autolamp Cobalt II bulbs, not only were they relatively cheap, they had exceptionally fast delivery and they work a treat.

MobFox Rubbish

I feel I must blog my experience with MobFox after a disappointing experience.

I've got a few apps on the Android market, which is now called Google play, that are free to download and use. In order to receive some money for the time and effort I put in to creating them I have ads displayed within them.

Admob are the people I was using and up until a few days ago all was well. Then I noticed that the eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) had dropped significantly and thus I wasn't making much money (not that I was making a lot before).

So after searching google, perhaps I should say googling, I found MobFox. Apparently it has good eCPM! I thought great so I signed up. Opening up my development environment I changed the code for one of my apps to use MobFox. It seemed fine and was displaying a test banner. Excellent, so I submitted my site to MobFox to review so that I could get proper ads, not test ones.
24 hours go by and I receive an email to say my submission was rejected. That's odd, I thought, because it was fine on Admob and I filled in all the relevant fields as best I could.
They had a link to FAQ about reasons why my app may have been rejected. But looking through them I couldn't see why. I'd filled in the URL correctly, found the closest Main Channel and it didn't contain any adult material, etc. So I sent MobFox an email asking why it rejected my app, so that I could correct it and get it all up and running.
Another few days pass, no response from MobFox! Now this might not sound too bad but I'm loosing money because my app is displaying Test banners to people rather than live ones. Basically I'm loosing money.

Fantastic! All in all I wish I'd not bothered trying out MobFox. It turned out there was a problem with Admob that caused the low eCPM. So now I've updated the app and put it back to Admob.
The problem I now have is deleting/cancelling my account with MobFox! As you may suspect there is no obvious way of cancelling/deleting my account with them. Search their website with no answers, so I've sent another email... who knows if it will get a response?!

My summary is this. If you want to put ads in your Android apps I'd recomment AdMob.com. It's a google company and it takes no time at all to set up. There are no approval times to wait for you create your account, add the code to your app, add your app to their site and away you go! Simple.

Hope that helps someone out there...

Update 19/11/2012:
After an entire month without hearing anything from MobFox, this morning I got 3 emails. Two to say that my apps have been accepted and I should now receive live ads. The other to say sorry for the long silence and all my apps are activated! I cannot believe that they think leaving it 1 month for a reply is acceptable.
I urge you all out there to be very wary of this company!