WOOT Ripoff: Energizer XP8000 battery

I received the Energizer XP8000 battery from Woot today, that I ordered around 8/11, specifically because it is supposed to charge the iPad as well, which takes double the standard iPhone charge -  2 Amps at 5 Volts = 10 Watts. The iPhone takes 1 Amp at 5 Volts = 5 Watts, and your standard USB port puts out .5 Amps at 5 Volts = 2.5 Watts, if I have my facts straight.

Well there was a little bag for the iPad adapter (PC007), and some instructions inside, but no adapter tip. So either somebody stole it, or Energizer never put it in.

What makes this worse is I went to the Energizer site, where I am supposed to get two free tips a year with registration, registered, searched for the iPad tip, could see it in the list, but was unable to order it. There’s no information on why, if they are out of stock or if the tip catches on fire or what. A Google search didn’t turn up any more info.

I’ll keep the device, because I can use it for cell phones and netbooks, etc., but what a bad experience. Hopefully some day I will get the right tip, though I can tell it’s going to involve pain and suffering. I will think twice about doing business with either of these companies again.

This has all happened before many times

Great article on the trend away from web sites to cloud applications and the business drivers thereof on Wired:

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1

I had not considered this particular discussion (future of www) from this angle before, due to a lack of interest in advertising, which in light of the article appears to be akin to a lack of interest in money, and something of a blind spot. I have previously explored the idea of the internet and http being the new general purpose network, many times, but perhaps not on this blog.

The term cloud computing really begins to make sense here as well. I have been telling people to just substitute the word “internet” for cloud computing. But as this article makes clear (without actually saying it), is that cloud computing is the internet as a backend, without it’s default client, www. It’s a storage device, a computing platform, a delivery network. All these new custom apps are the front end client, or will be. Thus Google’s new Chrome Store, a place to now sell us, as apps, the very content and functionality we’ve been viewing for free as web pages for so long, begins to make perfect scary sense.

There’s a lot more to say about this topic. For instance it’s various back-stories of standard business cycles and even lifecycles. Birth, growth, learning, periods of discovery and wildness, time of work and contribution, injury, sickness, aging, death. But I don’t want to distract from the focus of Wired’s article. I was all for “apps” when they were just an alternate means to reach new audiences with our web content, but now that I can see this new angle of apps being yet another nefarious plot by brick and mortar big business to retain their stranglehold on my wallet and attention. Yikes!

I get my music from the TV

I've been saying for awhile that YouTube is the new FM radio. And that's especially true with teens I think. For me as an adult, I've been finding new music via the TV believe it or not. I hear snippets of things I like in the background of a sitcom or commercial. Usually Shazam on the iPhone can identify it, or you can almost always find it on the Internet by looking up the commercial or show. Right now I'm listening to Solomon Burke's album, "Don't give up on Me", from hearing part of "None of us are Free" while Netflix-ing (yup new verb) season two of "House".

Another good use for the iPad

I just found another good use for the iPad. Perhaps this one is self-evident, but it was an eye-opener to me. Up to this point I had been considering the iPad strictly from the content consumption angle.

I needed to make a list today, away from my computer, but having it end up in the computer. Now sure I could use paper and pen, or the iPhone, or even pull the laptop out of the dock. I’ve got netbooks available to use. But the nice thing about the iPad is that it hits the middle ground perfectly. It’s just slightly easier and slightly more suited to the task in every way. More portable than the netbook and laptop, bigger screen and keyboard than the iPhone, can be synced back to the PC unlike paper.

I agree any one of those other tools would have worked fine. But when I think of the iPad in my home it’s for watching movies, reading books, playing games, catching up on news. I do think of tablets being put to great use in industrial factories for production support. I’m a fan of the current discussion around reducing friction in terms of GTD (Getting Things Done – task management) – that is we tend to keep doing things that are easy – so if we want to do a certain thing, especially repetitively, we need to make it absolutely easy to do. So after today I want to look at common situations, especially around tasks, and see if the iPad can make any of them easier to do.

Facebook Timeline View

Facebook has two "feed" views: "Top News", and "Most Recent". It makes no sense to me, but Top News seems to be the default, I assume somehow due to their unhealthy fascination with Twitter. However that view is useless to me for the way I track Facebook, I need the Most Recent view. Well the iPhone client, and the mobile web client both only provide the Top News view. WHY do something like this to your customers? You already have all the backend functionality and scalability, and you already have the list in the front end, with slightly different data.

Convert two AT&T lines to FamilyTalk plan –part two

Here’s part 1 -
http://iponderus.com/2010/07/convert-two-at-lines-to-familytalk-plan.html .

Ok I’m on the other side of this process finally, and I want to say it was even more of a nightmare than I imagined. I did some more reading after the first post, and a lot of the comments indicated that you really would have better luck going into the store. So I did.

Bottom line is that whether you go into the store, look all over their website, or call customer support, you cannot go from one line to a Family plan. No way. You first have to order a second line with it’s own plan, receive the phone and activate that second line, and then you can begin the process to covert those two lines to a Family Talk plan.

Does anybody besides me see how CRAZY this is? That I have to order a whole bunch of stuff I don’t want, receive it and activate it, basically start using it? Why can’t I, with one click, change from a single line to a family plan, and then order the phones for the new lines under the family plan. This is insane!

Want to know what makes it worse? They want to charge you BIG-TIME for this plan you never wanted. They wanted to charge me for a full month of two plans, at a cost to me of somewhere between $70-$100.

I ended up calling support to change to the family plan (after I received and activated the new phone and second line. One problem with this method – NO PAPERWORK – I got no emails confirming any of the changes (though I get emails for stupid changes like confirming I don’t want them spamming me with marketing).

When I got my bill I was livid, it was still roughly $70 higher than I expected. They did not charge me for an extra full month from the second line’s single plan, however they did swap primary and secondary lines, which messed up all my accounts, discounts, and history. They also prorated plans, somehow charging me for 20 extra text messages, during time-periods when I was fully covered by texting plans.

However when I called I got a very patient, very kind, support person, who worked through the whole bill with me. In the end they credited all the problem charges back to me, plus a $25 credit for my trouble, and fixed the swapped numbers etc. As mad as I was, that support person really gained some company loyalty from me by sticking with me and helping me. I’m well aware that support is considered a commodity, but I for one think it is a differentiator. Companies that provide good support promote their brand and gain customer loyalty, and the value has been set unreasonably low on that up to now.

So kudos to AT&T for good support folks, both on the line and at the store. However your website is a nightmare, an absolute train-wreck. Somebody who works on it needs to try to use it like a user. And going from one line to a Family Talk plan? That process is an absolutely stupid black eye on you AT&T!

Are AT&T and Apple conspiring to steal your data and charging you extra to do it?

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2450738&start=0&tstart=0

Don’t read the 37 pages of the thread above if you have a weak stomach or trouble sleeping at night. Currently this is a story with no ending.

I got warning from AT&T that one of my new iPhone 4’s was approaching it’s monthly data limit. This was a phone with the 200mb/month plan that we had been assured would be sufficient for almost everyone, and it was about a WEEK into the month. AT&T provides a web page that lists data usage. I could see that there were charges during times when we were at home, and the phone should have been on WIFI. In addition I could see a big data hit of ~20mb, at 2am one night, when we were sleeping, not even using the phone.

It turns out lots of people are having similar problems, phones connecting over 3G when they should be on WIFI, phones with big data transfers when nobody is using them, discrepancies between what the phone reports for data usage vs AT&T’s site, and on and on.

So I feel trapped into it, but I have upgraded that phone’s data plan to 2Gb. I hope that is sufficient, and wish there was a 5Gb (unrealistically and incorrectly called unlimited) plan.

What a nightmare!