Skip to main content

A Second Class Citizen at the Verizon Wireless Store

A couple of days ago, a new, large Verizon Store sprung up down the road.  At about the same time, Verizon finally announced the availability of the new and long awaited Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone - The phone that was hyped by Google and Samsung in early October, announced in Late October, promised to be released in November, and then delayed and delayed until the middle of December.  It's been all over the news and in people's faces.

I figured the timing was no accident, and sauntered in to see if I might be able to have a look at this Ice Cream Sandwich laiden beast.  To be honest, I was half expecting them to tell me they didn't have one.  As a Verizon Wireless customer in Vermont for over 15 years, I've gotten used to being a second-class citizen.  We are the usually the last to get network upgrades, good stores with good phones, or sales people who can handle technical questions.

I walked in and quickly surveyed the store, before I was immediately swooped down upon by an overly-smiley sales lady.  The first red flag: all of the showroom phones were phonnequins (faux plastic mock-ups with stickers instead of a real display).  There were no functional units anywhere.

I asked her if I could see the new Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and she said "sure". She "just needed to know my account info", so she could look it up.  This was new and weird to me, as all I wanted to do was look at a phone.  I gave her my account info, and she returned a few minutes later with a brand-new-in-box Galaxy Nexus.  It had never been opened (and, as you may have guessed, was not activated).  She took it out and fiddled with the phone, which was sitting at the activation wizard.  She tried to subtly ask her colleague what the "unlock code" was for the phone (lol). Unsurprisingly, he was not much help.  She then cheerfully handed me the phone, saying "well, at least you can get your hands on it!".  Today would not be the day I would get to play with Ice Cream Sandwich.

As I inspected the phone's physical attributes, namely its bigness in the hand, and the appearance of its SuperAMOLED 4.65" high def screen, the sales lady pointed out that it was about the same size as the Samsung Charge, but, and I quote, "the big thing with that is the face unlock."  I almost burst out laughing, but she was serious.

I'd had all I could take, and I got out of there as fast as I could.  I think I'll wait until one of my friends gets a Gnex so I can look at it for real, since I apparently can't see one at my local Verizon Store.  Wait, what am I thinking?  I can just download a face unlock app to the Samsung Droid Charge, and I'd basically have myself a Samsung Galaxy Nexus!
Labels:

Comments

Red Helix said…
hahaha lolz
1:08 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reaper, Linux, and the Behringer X-Air - Complete Studio Solution, Part 1

Introduction and Rationale This is part one of a major effort to document my experiences with recreating my home studio, entirely using Linux.  Without getting into too many of the specifics, a few months ago I decided that I was unhappy with Windows' shenanigans - to the point that I was ready to make a serious attempt to leave it behind.  For most in this situation, the obvious choice is to switch to Mac OS.  With its proven track record, support, and options for multimedia production, it is naturally the first alternative to consider if your goal is to simply use something other than Windows. For me the choice was not so simple. I despise Mac OS and, in general, the goals and philosophies put forth by Apple in an effort to ostensibly provide users with an "easy" working environment.  It does not help that I have also failed to find any aspect of the Mac OS UI intuitive, but I realize that this is a subjective matter. With my IT background and user-control* favori
Post a Comment
Read more

An Alternative Take on AI Doom and Gloom

 I've purposely held my tongue until now on commenting about "AI" (or, more specifically as has come to be known, GAN or Generative Adversarial Networks).  It seems like it is very in-style to complain about how it has made a real mess of things, it is displacing jobs, the product it creates lacks soul, it's going to get smart and kill us all, etc. etc.  But I'm not here to do any of that. Rather I am going to remind everyone of how amazing a phenomenon it is to watch a disruptive technology becoming democratized From the time of its (seeming) introduction to the public at large, around November of 2022, to late 2023, the growth and adoption rate has been nothing short of explosive. It features the fastest adoption rate of any new technology ever, by a broad margin.  To give a reference, the adoption rate for AI image and text generation, real-world uses, in just 12 months is comparable to all of that of the another disruptive technology, the World Wide Web, takin
Post a Comment
Read more

RANT TIME: Why do replies to a message I sent go to my spam folder?

Despite what one would think/hope, sending a message to a given address does not inherently give Google a high confidence that a reply from this address is expected (and, for example, that it should bypass spam checks). I have confirmed with Google's tech support that there is no way to automatically have this happen. The user can do the following: 1. Add the address to your contacts list in Gmail. 2. Check spam folder for replies, and mark it as "not spam" if something ends up there, which should influence the fate of future replies received. I can also approve an address at the domain level, i.e. if it is a big vendor or similar. I've had to do this with several of our Chinese vendors. I regularly ask engineering and purchasing to give me a list of the supplies we deal with, so I can approve them as a preventative measure. For what it's worth, all of the false positive instances of reply -> spam we have experienced have involved the sender's email server
Post a Comment
Read more