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Settlement Good News for MotorolaV710 Owners
bluebanzai writes "When hordes of people bought up the Motorola V710 upon its release a year ago, Slashdot readers may remember many impressive features including the cutting edge Bluetooth features (picture/mp3 transfer, wireless syncing) as described on Motorola's website. However, when used with the popular Verizon Wireless cell phone service provider, many Bluetooth features were sadly crippled (apart from a wireless headset) because OBEX features had been purposely disabled by Verizon. Hundreds of people donated to a hacker rewards program to unlock the full features of the phone to the tune of $3000, but was never fully successful.
Well, one year later, the Los Angeles Superior Court (PDF Warning) and Verizon have announced the initial steps of a Class Action Lawsuit that appears to be influenced by the user community allowing everyone who bought it before the start of 2005 a few options for compensation--including a refund up to the purchase price of another phone which, interestingly enough, is a lot easier to hack."
including a refund up to the purchase price of another phone which, interestingly enough, is a lot easier to hack.
How about Verizon just stop crippling their customers and unlock the locked features?
This seems to be a unique problem to US mobile phone markets. Why the hell do they require the phone company's own phone?
In any other part of the world, you buy your own phone from wherever you choose (even another country) and just plug in a sim card from your chosen provider and it just works.
If any provier here tried to pull those tricks, the market would take care of the problem very quickly.
Is GSM actually getting any foothold in the US market?
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
I bought 2 of these phones from Verizon and was so upset with the situation I cancelled the service even-though I had to eat the cancellation fee. In the settlement mailing there are 3 options.
1) Current Verizon customers that want to keep the phone and the service may get a $25 credit to their bill.
2) Current customers who want to keep their service but not their phone may send it in for a refund.
3) Customers who cancelled their service and paid the cancellation fee can get a refund of the fee.
I am not sure why they just don't enable OBEX?! That is what everyone wanted in the first place.
My
"Q. Well, these features are available in phones from many other carriers, and people feel cheated. ... [Those features] don't work with our business model. Every customer is certainly entitled to their own feelings. "
A. Verizon does business unlike any other carrier, and we make no apologies for that.
'we make no apologies for that' =Translation= We do what we want, when we want, and you do not matter.
'don't work with our business model' =Translation= It is much more profitable for us this way
'Every customer is certainly entitled to their own feelings.' =Translation= F You!!!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Step 1: Advise company to alter features in such a way that they can make more profit, and let them pay you.
Step 2: Find group of disgruntled customers and file class action suit, and let them pay you.
Step 3: Profit from step 1 & 2, with in step 2 the added bonus of a percentage of the settlement.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Money that used to be spent on marketing and customer service gurus is now being spent, ten fold, on lawyers to handle extremely disgruntled customers, who are rarely, in their entirety, the complete techno-illiterates these companies assume they are.
Unfortunately, with so many companies either ex-monopolies or attempting to work in such a mode, for the most part legal threats are becoming the only real way customers can voice their dissatisfaction and expect changes.
I hate telephone companies, or at least I hate their marketing departments. They're all dishonest. They all lie about charges, and they lobby the FCC to give them get-outs when they do. They always try to push contracts that are absurdly long. They pretend they're selling one thing (as in this case) when they're actually selling something lesser. They push contracts that are inherently unfair and one-sided. (No, it doesn't take two years to recover a phone subsidy, indeed with tariffs usually around $50 a month, it usually barely takes two months. More to the point, if the issue is subsidies, why don't you just let early cancellers return their subsidized phones, in working condition, if they want to cancel before the end of the contract? And why not make it easy for those who already have compatable equipment to sign up on a month-to-month basis, maybe even with - *gasp* a discounted talk plan given they've just saved you your precious subsidy - I'll tell you why, because the idea the two year contracts have anything to do with subsidies is complete and total bullshit.)
I'd like to think some kind of free-market darwinism will fix this. It's hard to tell. Mobile carriers are so varied in quality that people will shun the best, most reasonable, because, for example, it has 1900MHz licenses and thus, through no fault of its own, has poorer indoor coverage. So, ultimately, people are going to resort to lawsuits to fix these issues. In this case, I say good luck to the lawyers. Once the operators start acting decently again, maybe I'll start whining about frivilous lawsuits, but the big operators are not doing so, so screw 'em, and throw every complaint they're not prepared to deal with honourably back at 'em in court.
And if it makes a few lawyers rich, that's great. If someone's doing a public service, I don't have a problem with them earning money from it.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Basically, we have an industry which makes loads of cash by preventing their customers from using technology to make things cheaper and more efficient. It is in the industry's interest to make sure that we download expensive ring tones and backgrounds from them, rather than simply using an MP3 or an image downloaded from the web.
In other words: This industry artificially maintains its profits by using what I consider to be highly immoral methods. If they did not have this choke hold on the market, the industry would shrink a lot and lots of people (investors, content owners...) would probably lose a whole lot of money.
It is almost like a cartel where various companies (content owners, mobile makers, etc.) get together to agree on how to squeeze the most money out of people and maximizing their own profits. Something like price fixing.
I am kind of wondering why no mobile maker has released a phone which lets the user do anything. Do they depend on content owners and network operators to make money?
Clever signature text goes here.
Do you shop at Walmart, Target, Old Navy? Do you scour fatwallet or slickdeals? Do you shop for the cheapest broadband service? Well, why then would a manufacturer waste storeshelf space on really expensive stuff when you only buy cheap crap?
Showing prices after mailin rebates work in the US for a reason...because most people focus on price. Price at any cost. Maybe not you, maybe not me, but the majority of Americans, yes. Remember, this is the home of the Big Gulp and Costco. Where more=cheaper=better.
So if you're one of the rare Americans that buy high-quality stuff at high prices, then you shouldn't care that Verizon or Cingular doesn't offer some high-end phones. Go and buy your Bang and Olfsen CD case. Nor should you care that some Japanese import game isn't available in the US. You just buy them from some of the many numerous online vendors that sell them. And you buy your phone without the subsidy lock or your import PS2 without the discounts that come with volume. But since you don't care about price, you'll pay that right?
Until the market starts buying expensive phones (which the manufacturers would love to sell, by the way), the carriers won't waste the effort trying to sell them. When you see regular Americans (not early adopters) routinely pay $400 for a phone, carriers will be happy to offer that model.
You want to know where we beat virtually everyone else in the modern world? Gasoline prices (no taxes), SUV choices (cheap gas), home square footage (suburb living), grain production (subsidized farming). Folks paying $10/gallon find it annoying we complain so loudly about $3/gallon.
Do you really feel that bad that your fellow Americans don't have the option to buy some phone that you like? Or are you really upset that the majority of Americans don't feel as passionate about tech as you do and so you can't get a discount on your niche-market phone?
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