It’s a loaded question I’ll admit.  Vague and highly interprative.  What I see is a glaring yes but in a strange way.  No company goes through more legal minutia than Microsoft.  Their legal team is so bad-ass that back in the day when they took on the US Government over bundled software issues, they settled making all the consumer watchdog wannabe politicians think they had won by splitting their company.  What really happened is now we all pay 150.00$ for Microsoft software that used to come bundled with the OS.  It’s the sort of sadistic legal end game that gives Steve Job’s wet dreams. 

Anyway, when I say that I believe Microsoft was playing it safe I mean legally not financially.  Everytime Microsoft tries to assert itself and leverage existing services they get sued all to hell by some anti-trust litigation because of all those big numbers DavidK and Murani have been throwing around the past couple of days.  Microsoft goes through so many legal battles they give out their legal services to any hardware manufacturer licensing their OS, just to keep their boys in shape (and it makes their Operating System a lot more enticing when Google isn’t backing anybody up in the Android litigation.)  I just can’t help but wonder if Microsoft is the sort of company with deep enough pockets to allow their mobile market share to slip, fostering some competition, which takes the heat off of Microsoft when they step their game up.  Google wasn’t all green lights on their ad acquisitions until Apple bought their own company as well.  I’m not saying that Microsoft hasn’t still f-ed up their market share more than I think is good for anyone because they basically put themselves out to pasture the past two years.  I’m just pondering on the idea that Microsoft played the “Let’s wait and see what everyone likes from the two other huge companies doing this right now and then put out some crazy hybrid bridge between market shares that whoops ass like some sort of digital Bruce Lee/Chuck Norris monstrosity of unequivocal awesomeness” game.  For more on this strategy see the Xbox.

Hello everyone.  This will be an Adventures at Best Buy kind of thing for you.  Guy calls in (cause I answer phones for the entire store) and says “Do you guys have the new Droid?”  So I assumed what every English speaking person does when the term “new” is used and default to the most recent “Droid” I know of which is this:

For the uninitiated and the customer’s education this is Motorola’s second Droid phone known as the Droid Shadow.  Motorola has released several devices that run the Android Operating System, including this abortion candidate, all of which are entirely different.  To give faith in general common sense the benefit of the doubt I thought to myself that maybe his misappropriation of the term was just limited to him and his knowledge of the Android Operating System, so by this logic and assuming he simply meant the newest one to hit the market I asked if he was looking for the HTC Evo or maybe even that other half-assed attempt at Android by my baselessly preferred carrier of choice.  I was, again, wrong.  This leads me to my establishment of blame.  The customer was looking for the HTC Incredible.  This is Verizon’s most recent Android phone, aggressively advertised as a “Droid”.  This customers confusion was due to nothing short of an immensely lazy marketing campaign.  So in order to establish in a clear manner that this was not the customer’s fault in any way I have prepared the following message for Verizon (formerly known as Verizon Wireless.)

To Verizon,

   Clean your shit up so I don’t have to deal with it!  Help your customers out and use consistent terminology to industry standards and maybe spend more than a 5th grader’s lunch money on the creative peoples in your marketing department.  Otherwise continue to kick-ass despite a reportedly slower network while the big blue fruit loving behemoth grinds to a halt under the weight of phones and pads for people who like to buy functionally crippled devices due to restrictive software in vain attempts to be trendy while at the same time forcing me to abandon almost a decade of customer loyaltly bargaining leverage when dealing with their customer service in order to get a decently spec’d phone that doesn’t link any of my credit cards directly with Steve Jobs retirement/global domination fund. 

ATT Customer and Electronics Support Employee

Matt Anderson

That is all.

Now this is probably not directed at the majority of our readership as our predisposition towards tweaks and tricks for modding out cell phones tends to be for the more gadget minded.  However, why does the general public expect to be fully educated about a product they buy when purchasing electronics specifically?  I don’t know of any other industry where this is expected.  Even when you buy schoolbooks you don’t expect Amazon to teach you the stuff in the book?  When you buy a grill from somewhere they don’t teach you to cook.  This is a problem.  A major one.  Anyone that has seen Idiocracy can vouch for me here.  I’m not saying everyone needs to be a genius but I feel like the general consumer should be able to both read and comprehend an owner’s manual.  Answering phones at Best Buy has left me teaching people the concept of a table of contents.  How in the hell did you miss that in primary school?  I’m not asking everyone to be a gadget wizard or understand registries or even be able to run a script but some basic literacy skills are expected of any high school graduate.  Manufacturers kill hundreds of arguably important trees to produce these manuals for those foliage loving hippies and they don’t bother even attempting to read it. 

Which brings me to my general point for venting all of the rage built up in the past few hours at work.  Google can fix all your problems.  I’m not saying if you need a cell phone then buy a Nexus One, but if you are unsure of what to get why not use Google to do some research?  Ladies Google their fellas of interest to see if they are big enough creeps or weirdos to appear on their list and this is exactly what I do with every product I consider for purchase as well.  You find reviews and specifics for the product in question, plus you usually pull up major issues with the device as well.  You just have to be intelligent enough to form a question.  Trust me when I say that I don’t owe Best Buy any credit in my quest for electronics knowledge.  Just about everything I know about the world of electronics (and some other sparse categories here and there) has been through my use of the Google search engine.  Whether it is to attain general product info or a solution to a specific problem Google is my fall back for all questions without answers.  I don’t care who of you out there are Bingers (though I use it occasionally to compare search results) but either way that’s not who got you through the past 12 years.  And hotmail can eat my ass. 

I’m sorry if I’ve offended any luddites or anyone with family members that have an aversion to technology.  I’m not upset they don’t know anything.  I’m upset at those who are determined to remain stupid and have the world do their work for them for free!

Update:  And thank Reddit for more fuel to the search engine debate fire.

So it may not be the Courier everyone was hoping for but this thing is all sorts of awesome looking.  Toshiba has been running their ultra-mobile Libretto line for quite a few years now and they’ve typically occupied price points north of 1,000$ and with this being limited production/prototype sort of model don’t expect any less.  Planned to launch for their 25th anniversary late this summer the W100 is going to be rocking side by side 7 inch multi-touch screens with Windows 7 Home Premium.  It’s also packing a 1.2GHz Intel U5400 processor with 2GB of DDR3 and 62GB of solid state sweetness.  Haptic feedback on a virtual keyboard included, although I’ll be looking into a nice pen/capacative stylus I can carry around for One Note and other such handwriting recognition awesomeness.  More info and video links after the break. Continue reading »

Engadget has run a recent article supposedly revealing Best Buy’s launch inventory of the iPhone 4.  I want all our readers to know, whether I like iPhones or not, that this is bullshit.  Our inventory system is a complex thing (I work at BBY) and their comments are from far outside the context of our system.  You ever order a bunch of crap from a retailer only to get an email back saying “Thanks for buying all our overpriced crap.  We don’t have it all yet so we’re going to send you some stuff now and the rest whenever the hell we feel like it.”  That’s basically what this On Order sort of stuff means.  Best Buy’s plan is really freaking simple.  Take a bunch of pre-orders, don’t piss off customers by cancelling orders they’ve already taken, and as iPhones come in start at the top of the list and go down.  They do not promise any units on launch day although every Best Buy should get them.  The white is going to be harder to come by for sure.  As for iPhones for non-preorders on launch, this is likely going to be a no if Best Buy continues to take preorders but no one really knows.  Depends on the individual stores inventory vs. preorder on launch day.  Hopefully Apple won’t be stingy with the product.  Whatever you do, don’t believe Engadget.

I wanted to let you all in on some of our email chaos amongst the staff.  I think it represents the departure of a great deal of what constituted many user’s reasons for choosing Windows Mobile.  We were discussing Android fragmentation and it made me a little uneasy with what he said about the new Windows Phones that will be coming out this holiday season.  He started with this little gem:

“can’t wait for WP7 so 100% of it’s users are running the latest build:)”

This is what scared me.  I got glimpses of forced OTA updates that brick my phone (because MS has def F’d my PC royally with those).  That as well as the fact your basically allowing MS to have admin rights on your phone!  When Apple did it I said it was a bad idea.  I’m no fanboy and I’m not going to be some wishy-washy douche bag on it either.  MS you suck for doing this.  I don’t want you to decide what apps should go on my phone.  I don’t want you to have the priviledge to revoke things remotely from my phone.  I’m an intelligent person that likely knows anywhere from 10-20x more information about the phone than the monkeys you’ve probably got pushing the “screw the consumer” buttons over on your server side.  All this rage is coupled with the fact that your fancy-schmancy metro bullshit can’t do anything but change colors.  DavidK’s sense of customizability is limited to the following in scope:

I’m sure you’ll find a way to do something fancy with WP7. I bet there will
be a way to change the UI to some degree – probably smaller tiles so there
are more per page or something. Ultimately the UI is part of the OS so it’s
not going to be easily replaced. It’s not an app launcher – the live tiles
are all integrated so any replacement UI would need to hook into all of the
same things. It can easily be done if a real developer takes the time, but
no one on XDA will build anything that good and the real developers won’t
spend their time cause they won’t be able to sell it…
You’ll get over it when you get updates to your phone and don’t need to
flash your ROM cause the manufacturer is too lazy to upgrade your device…

Double no bitches!  That is not customizability.  That is the facade of choice.  Marketing bullshit as gold is as old as religion itself and this is no different.  I understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.  I just don’t know if I want to participate in trying to out-douche Apple.  And saying that dev’s won’t be able to sell a UI?  Tell that to SPB, makers of the best selling WinMo app for at least 3 or 4 years.  Those guys have been stomping ass all over the place selling a 30.00$ app, and Microsoft, in all of Apple’s infinite wisdom,  have decided to remove the bread and butter from one of the most polished and quality app makers they have.  It’s getting harder and harder to hold onto the fence between Android and WinPho7.  My dreams of off-the wall linux based phones are going vaporware so I’ve only got a few questions left for making my decision on phones and only one that can be answered at the moment.  So Doug Simmons, how you living buddy?

DavidK wanted to do an article about the death of point and shoot cameras with the rise of decent camera technology in newer smartphones.  I was of the dissenting opinion that, despite having high mega-pixel ratings for camera phones, they still fall very far short of traditional camera designs for several reasons.  We were too lazy to duke it out but we did want to know what the readers thought.  To do an overall comparison between the two products we wanted to narrow it down to several categories for overall product value and not just performance.  The rundown will go like this: Price, Connectivity, Quality, Ease of Use, and Convenience.  Some of these categories will be a little more or less important than others, but I’ll try to keep the tech jargon to a minimum to get my point across.  I’ll run a poll after the breakdowns so you can tell us who was right or at least less wrong than the other.  Read on for perspective.  Continue reading »

I love finding good news at the beginning of the day.  This sounds like a nice set of hardware too.  Sony Ericsson is rumored to be working on a 4″ obviously capacative multi-touch display phone running the Windows Phone 7 OS.  It’s going to have a slide-out qwerty that I’m praying will be landscape, like the Xperia, and not portrait like the Pre.  Portrait keyboard keys are just too small after owning a landscape slider.  Right now the device is going under the code name Julie with no face to put to the name (that’s just a shop-job by Anudeep before anyone gets excited ).  This is all rumor stuff for now and I can’t be certain how right this is because when I tried to chase down the original story, jumping through links from place to place, you end up with THIS Japanese (?) site.

I think this will make for a pretty sweet phone due to screen size alone.  Sony isn’t known for making total crap hardware smartphones.  They usually mess up somewhere in the software side of things, which Microsoft has pretty much put an end to.  People’s complaints that the HD2 and Evo are pocket clogging monstrosities will be relaxed a good deal by the .3″ reduction, and those feeling a little too close to their 3.5″ screens can finally take a step back.  I liked the size of the Xperia as far as hardware is concerned and the software restrictions, coupled with stringent hardware requirements should keep this thing on track to be, quite possibly, one of the highest end devices for WP7 in the coming season.  Again this is all rumor for now, but the first English speaking SOURCE for this info claims it to be a fairly and previously reliable informant.  Now I want to see what it looks like.  Either way I doubt it can get much uglier than that LG everyone’s had to look at for the last few weeks.

Anyone who’s tried to download ROMs and software from forums like XDA will most likely curse those bandwidth squating bastards.  Well luckily we have a NEW SOURCE for hosting all these ROMs with direct downloads and BitTorrent distribution for backup to ensure when NRG puts out a new ROM and crashes the servers (he stresses the multiple server point for reliability) users can still get at the thing through decentralized means.  He’s going to host Android and Windows Mobile ROMs so everyone worth hearing about is included.  This is going to be a hosting and release site, not a development site, so you won’t see tons of technical non-sense here but just ROMs, hopefully some rating system, and at the least always-on access to ROMs when we need them.  I’d still use XDA’s ROM rating site they started up a while back because it has fewer ads and an easier system for finding ROMS along with more variety.  This is just going to allow much quicker distribution and less waiting when things get busy in the world of the phone tinkerer.  If you’re a chef, you might want to look into this one and see if you can’t get some free hosting that doesn’t suck all kinds of ass.

I woke up this morning feeling nice and refreshed for the first time in a few days because my A/C is broken.  So you can imagine how pissed off I got having such a great start subesquently ruined by THIS wmpoweruser.com article.  Now I’m not some perve that gets his rocks off on the go with his mobile device or anything I’m just pissed about what sort of precedent this sets.  With no side-loading apps and all kinds of retarded dev activation hoops this is getting worse by the day.  Microsoft is stomping all over its own reputation for being fairly relaxed in its dictation of software uses but this goes further than I can let slide.

This means I’ll most likely be going Android or something else not iPhone, depending on where WebOS goes, because I’m not doubting we’ll continue to see that being licensed to phones in the future.  Since HP isn’t “getting into the phone business” that still leaves this OS as something that may be licensed should they choose to make the most of their purchase.  There may be hope for WP7 somewhere if Microsoft isn’t telling us the whole story but it seems the more I hear the further I get from the idea that this could be my next phone.  I’m still on the fence but that was a hard shove in one direction.

And why is everyone so scared of nipples?  I just don’t understand it.  Picture of a naked girl with exposed breast=bad but same chick with electrical tape over just her nipples=acceptable somehow.  I say down with the nipple embargo for iPhones, WP7, and American, Bible-thumping, puritanical society as a whole.  If Europe wants to use exposed nipples to sell orange juice and other household prodcuts so be it.  If you want your weather told you by large chesticled women (or shirtless men, because I’m not sexist here) then so be it.  But Microsoft, your wireless carrier, isp, or local governmental authority should not be making that decision for you.  Free the nipples!