Fun facts about Alltel and consumer deception.
So my wife got a new Samsung Hue phone from Alltel – nice little gadget, bluetooth, camera, the whole works, and pretty cheap too. I was even thinking about seeing if father’s day might come a little bit early this year after seeing it in action. 😆 The one hiccup she’d really had with it was when she tried to pair her bluetooth headset to it – she couldn’t ever get the two devices talking to each other, and had to go back to the store to do it, where one of their sales/service people took the phone and the headset behind closed doors and got them to work. That really should’ve been a red flag right there.
She wanted me to put the slideshow of Evan pics on there that we’ve both had on our Nokia phones for ages; this was basically an animated GIF that cycles through numerous pictures of the little guy from the day he was born up to the latest round of professional pictures we’ve had taken of him. With the Nokia phones, I was able to just bluetooth the GIF across and be done with it; this also accounted for the bizarre collection of ringtones that both of our phones sported, everything from the Lexx theme to Katamari music to the haunting Torgo theme to Starcon 2 tunes to a gob of ELO MIDI ringtones (don’t ask me how that happened).
Anyway, I couldn’t just send the files across to her new phone via bluetooth. After going through the documentation (custom printed for Alltel) and finding them extremely, almost suspiciously lacking in information about the use of the bluetooth feature, I did a little bit of digging around online and that quickly got my blood boiling. Here’s the deal: Alltel cripples OBEX file transfer on the Samsung Hue phones. You can’t use it. Only they can, on their premises. They’d rather charge you extra for a USB cable and their proprietary software, when in fact neither of the above should be necessary. They don’t want you to bluetooth your own MIDI files to your own phone in your own home. They don’t make money that way. They make money by you buying ringtones, etc. through their store, or through their affiliates who give Alltel a kickback to thank them for letting them sell to Alltel’s customers. They don’t want me beaming a few MIDI files across from my computer.
Via a member of the family, we actually have the ear of one of Alltel’s VPs, so we tried to play the old nepotism card, a phone call which yielded another very interesting fact: Alltel only sells one phone with all the features unlocked, and that’s the Motorola Razr. So hey, if you’ve got one of these unweildly, non-user-friendly bricks, there’s finally a perk in it for you. Yay for you!
In a few minutes we’ll be going to pay them a visit at the store where the phone was bought, point out that we were looking at getting a second one just like it, and then insisting that we can’t buy another one – or for that matter remain as customers of Alltel with any phone – unless this feature is unlocked so the phone works as advertised. I’m not glued to my cell phone 24 hours a day, I don’t txt my bff all the time (zomg!), I’m not really a “power user”. We just like having our kid’s smiling face on our cell phones, and a few oddball ringtones. Is that so wrong? Apparently Alltel thinks so.
I have a gut feeling we’re going to walk out of the Alltel store looking for a new cell phone provider.… Read more
Okay, so maybe we didn’t skate out of the bad weather as unscathed as I thought. Apparently there was some roof damage, nothing big but also not the sort of thing you want to allow to get big over time, and – to my total slackjawed amazement – the insurance adjuster decided both vehicles were totalled. 😯 I really didn’t think they were that bad – yeah, a few dings and dents here and there, especially on the driver’s side of my wife’s vehicle which she uses to deliver the mail – but apparently the insurance company feels like spending money. So…I guess the check’s in the mail, so to speak. In the meantime, either hail or wind or both apparently managed to push our sliding door off its track, something I had to fix tonight.
I’m sitting here watching KTUL showing, at almost 3 in the morning, a live shot of a rotating wall cloud marching into Tulsa County, and I’m thinking “man, am I glad I don’t live in Tulsa County.” Still, pretty amazing stuff…to watch from a distance of two hours away. No disrespect intended toward any TV weather guys or gals I’ve ever worked with in the past, but the guys at KTUL know how to make a show out of this stuff. I love the Wall Cloud Channel…so long as it’s not in my back yard.
Two things tonight that have me going “argh.”
One word of caution, though…anyone expecting anything as elaborate as the Phosphor Dot Fossils displays seen at OVGEs and OKGEs past might not want to get their hopes too high. I’m still all for doing these shows, but with the kiddo on the scene now, the thought definitely occurs that unplugging and uprooting the entire room for these shindigs is getting a little old. As of 2006, I did have a few TVs and monitors gathered that were set aside for “expo use only,” though in the absence of a 2007 OVGE, I started giving those away, figuring they wouldn’t be needed. 😆 (The general feeling in 2007 was that OVGE wouldn’t be back anytime soon, and with a baby on the way too, it didn’t seem like an unreasonable assumption that my exhibiting days were over.) At any rate, with something like three weeks to prepare, I can’t guarantee a really elaborate display – I’d say expect some Coleco tabletop goodness and the PDF DVD, as always. (After doing this for a few years, I know what the crowd pleasers are.) Actually, did you know that the first year I brought the tabletop games to Tulsa, it was because there was a behind-the-scenes freak-out about whether or not there’d be enough power for every exhibitor? I started bringing the battery-powered Coleco games as a way to hedge my bets against the possibility of not having enough power for stuff with screens and power supply wall warts. They turned out to be incredibly popular items because one just doesn’t see a complete collection in decent shape everyday, and as popular as they were in their day, they just haven’t worked their way into the public retro-video-game subconscious the way that the Atari 2600 and NES have. But everytime someone sees my little stack of these puppies, they always go “Oh yeah! I remember those!” And that’s what makes it worth it for me to keep buying fresh batteries and bringing these guys out to play year after year.
It’s all around me, yeah yeah yeah. Odd time to be blogging, I’ll admit, being in the middle of a thunderstorm warning with quite a sound and light show going on just outside my window, but I stay awake for these things just in case they wake Evan up.