I have some Carhartt pants that have a special cell phone pocket, about where a hammer loop would be. In my haste to start a load of laundry, I failed to check that pocket.
So now I have a Droid 2 that's an unhappy phone. It powers up, but no display. I moved service back to my Droid 1, which other than the keyboard is a mighty fine phone. Unlike the Droid 2, the basic telephony UI doesn't have the appearance of a UI designed by someone 20 years away from presbyopia. And the speaker phone volume goes all the way up to annoying!
So I check on the Droid 4. Five hundred and forty nine dollars, retail, with no contract renewal. Or $99 for a refurb unit -- but only with a contract renewal. Somewhere in between, perhaps half retail, is a new unit with contract renewal. Contract renewals get rid of the grandfathered "unlimited data". I don't use anywhere near the limit. But goddammit, I might. One day.
To me this pricing is like Safeway, but more insidious. If you ever go in a Safeway, you'll notice the way they do "sale" pricing. Do you want to pay "absolutely fucking ridiculous price" or do you want to pay "discount price that only comes with a discount card." What Safeway is doing is coercing you to submit to data tracking.
VZW is practicing the same sort of coercion, but they're coercing customers into new contracts. And they get to do it by talking about "subsidized price". They're doing you a fucking favor.
So, I'm a Droid 1 user.
NYC translation: Safeway = Genuardi's.
One reason I was dreading a T-Mobile merger was a concern that my 25 dollar phone card days would be over with ATT running the show.
Another rant:
"The brand name Droid is a trademark of Lucasfilm licensed to Verizon Wireless."
I remember being annoyed when Star Wars came out by Lucas' coinage of the word "droid." It was a well-established science fiction trope that a robot was a metal machine creature, while an android was a robot that resembled a human, with skin, hair, etc. R2D2 was clearly a robot but a generation was going to grow up thinking of it as an android, just because of Lucas' sloppy and lazy scriptwriting. An even greater injustice is that he gets to claim a property interest in this hokey word.
Perhaps he's all too human.
Hard to argue with that logic, but he's still a large spinach can.
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So now I have a Droid 2 that's an unhappy phone. It powers up, but no display. I moved service back to my Droid 1, which other than the keyboard is a mighty fine phone. Unlike the Droid 2, the basic telephony UI doesn't have the appearance of a UI designed by someone 20 years away from presbyopia. And the speaker phone volume goes all the way up to annoying!
So I check on the Droid 4. Five hundred and forty nine dollars, retail, with no contract renewal. Or $99 for a refurb unit -- but only with a contract renewal. Somewhere in between, perhaps half retail, is a new unit with contract renewal. Contract renewals get rid of the grandfathered "unlimited data". I don't use anywhere near the limit. But goddammit, I might. One day.
To me this pricing is like Safeway, but more insidious. If you ever go in a Safeway, you'll notice the way they do "sale" pricing. Do you want to pay "absolutely fucking ridiculous price" or do you want to pay "discount price that only comes with a discount card." What Safeway is doing is coercing you to submit to data tracking.
VZW is practicing the same sort of coercion, but they're coercing customers into new contracts. And they get to do it by talking about "subsidized price". They're doing you a fucking favor.
So, I'm a Droid 1 user.
- mark 5-29-2012 4:21 pm
NYC translation: Safeway = Genuardi's.
- mark 5-29-2012 4:34 pm
One reason I was dreading a T-Mobile merger was a concern that my 25 dollar phone card days would be over with ATT running the show.
Another rant:
"The brand name Droid is a trademark of Lucasfilm licensed to Verizon Wireless."
I remember being annoyed when Star Wars came out by Lucas' coinage of the word "droid." It was a well-established science fiction trope that a robot was a metal machine creature, while an android was a robot that resembled a human, with skin, hair, etc. R2D2 was clearly a robot but a generation was going to grow up thinking of it as an android, just because of Lucas' sloppy and lazy scriptwriting. An even greater injustice is that he gets to claim a property interest in this hokey word.
- tom moody 5-29-2012 9:21 pm
Perhaps he's all too human.
- mark 5-30-2012 7:58 am
Hard to argue with that logic, but he's still a large spinach can.
- tom moody 5-30-2012 1:03 pm