SquareTrade

Motorola Roadmap leaked.

Whoopsie!  Somebody at Motorola's beleaguered mobile division let go of an internal roadmap for nine handsets they plan to launch this year, and only one of them looks vaguely RAZRish. 

A few of these - the U9, the W270, the E8 - are already out in one country or another, but the big dog of the pack looks to be the ZN5, a Montavista Linux-run phone (2.6.1) with a 2.4" screen, 5-megapixel camera, TV-Out and a "morphing keypad" that sounds a lot like adaptive touch buttons that change depending on what phone function you're using at the time.  Fancy.

We're also curious to learn more about the VE75, a slider with a 2.6" screen, 2-megapixel camera and, most interestingly, dual sim card support.  And as far as we can tell, the L800T candybar phone is set to become Motorola's first TD-SCDMA device (that's a Chinese 3G standard, y'all); it sports a 1.9" screen, 2-megapixel camera, GSM/GPRS/TD-SCDMA support, bluetooth, etc.

No dates or prices yet on this stuff, of course... we weren't even suppose to see this stuff, after all.  But when they do show up, rest assured that your SquareTrade warranty will probably run you about half what any carrier's insurance plan would.  And we won't stick you with a refurb for your money, either. 

It's a fairly ambitious roll-out.  We'll have to wait and see if it makes a dent in Motorola's recent financial woes.

More details at Uberphones.

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Best Buy is Profiling You.

Looks like another ex-Best Buy employee has outted his company's policies regarding You, The Customer.  More properly known as You, The Angel or The Demon, depending on how cheap you are.  The swell guys over at The Consumerist have the full scoop (and screenshots of the official documents), but here are the fun parts;

Best Buy's customer service strategy, initiated in 2004, basically tags everybody who walks in the door as buy-on-sight "Angels" who are blind to sales or rebate-o-rama bargain hunters ("Demons") who aren't there to spend any real money.  You're also immediately stereotyped into one of eight personality types, from Buzz the early adopter to Helen and Charlie the empty nesters and super-yuppie Barry (expert hands can even break them down into "It's My Time Barry," 'Family First Barry," and "Entertainment Everywhere Barry"), and then each customer is approached accordingly. You get lots of attention if they peg you as a retiree with $10,000 in surplus annual income and no clue about "the internets," for example, and a lot more "guidance" if you appear to be a bored suburban housewife who's only thinking about her family's needs.

Needless to say, they're also trained to hit you with an extended warranty offer (especially you skinflint Demons) not because you particularly need one, but because they do.

Hey, the fact is not everything needs a warranty.  An iPhone?  Probably a smart move.  The new $50 1GB iPod Shuffle?  Probably not, unless you take yours spelunking... or if you're planning to keep it for three years, and want to drop six bucks as a guarantee it'll last that long.  That's a SquareTrade warranty price, of course... Best Buy's is nine bucks for two years.  We've got a 5-Day Guarantee and better reviews, too.

The lesson here is Pay Attention... and don't let anyone put you in a box.

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Best Buy's Geek Squad is so good, you'll sue them for $54 million dollars.

 Holy Underwear!  We thought the FireDog expose was bad, but we just caught wind of the latest post on The Red Tape Chronicles, written by MSNBC consumer editor Bob Sullivan, and Circuit City's largely disinterested repair drones force suddenly look like Olympian heroes compared to Best Buy's Geek Squad.

Here's how it shakes out; nonprofit exec Raelyn Campbell bought herself a $1100 laptop from The Buy, and then got sweet-talked into adding a $300 extended warranty to it (feel free to use the sidebar widget to see how much less a SquareTrade warranty would've cost her).  Turns out that was a good idea, because it conked out on her.  She takes it in, and is told repairs will take 2-6 weeks (us: five days).  As estimates go, turns out that was waaaaaaaaaay low. 

Roughly four months later, Campbell returns from an extended business trip.  That's nearly three times as long as the Geek Squad's worst-case repair time, so it should be done, yes?  No.  And she spends the next few months getting the run-around from an interchangeable cast of Best Buy phone voices trying to find out how much longer it'll take.  Finally, the sixth person she talks to admits they didn't have any idea where her laptop was.  Best Buy lost it.  But that's okay, because they offered her a $900 Best Buy gift card to compensate. 

Campbell decided to sue them for $54 million dollars instead. 

Least you think she picked that number out of a hat, it's the same amount a judge sued a laundry last year for loosing a pair of pants.  Unlike the judge's situation, however, Campbell's loss opened her up to the very real threat of identity theft, since whoever has her laptop also now has all her personal information.  She says she's not expecting to actually get $54 million, but it did get BB to up their compensation offer to the high $2K range. 

Also interesting: the stories people commenting on Sullivan's post tell.  One is an ex-Geek Squader who quit because this is apparently Standard Operating Procedure.  Another claims their computer was resold by Best Buy with all their personal data still on the hard drive; they were contacted by the new owner, who confirmed the laptop had the exact same problem they'd originally taken it in for.

Did we mention our customers rate us very highly in terms of customer satisfaction?

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Confessions of a Circuit City Repair Technician.

We love The Consumerist... so customer-friendly, so corporate-mean.  Today he links us to yet another confessional on why hauling your precious electronics in to a big box retailer for repairs or warranty work might not be the best experience of your life. 

Basically, Mr. X admits to everything you already knew, but it's nice to hear it right from the keyboard of a Circuit City FireDog technician.  Our personal favorites;

• "Most techs that are hired know little more than the basics, and learn as they go. You can't really have an experienced tech work on your machine, because once you leave, it may sit there for a few days, and who knows who will work on it then."

• "Your computer may well sit around for days without anyone looking at it. If we were low on computers to work on, we would often drag repairs out for days past when they should be done, just so we looked busy."

• "Sometimes, when we had a customer that kept bugging us because a part on his computer was taking forever to come in, we would just swap the part out with one off of a display computer to "expedite things."

As opposed to the service you get with a SquareTrade warranty, which our customers really enjoy, according to their reviews.  We complete every repair or cash reimbursement within five business days, and our technicians are technicians... customer service is an entirely different department, and we don't even have a sales division.  We let you make that decision. 

Oh, and we charge about half what Circuit City does.  Does that affect your decision at all?

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Digital photo frame comes with virus installed.

We don't usually do posts on digital photo frames because - even though as consumer electronics, they're eligible for SquareTrade warranties - we're personally not big fans of them quite yet.  But this story's special: the Insignia 10.4-inch photo frame was shipped out from the factory with a Trojan virus installed.  Fun!

Now, before we cause panic in the streets, there are a few caveats.  This ONLY affects the 10.4 model (SKU 8483866), and supposedly ONLY infects Windows computers when the frame's connected with a USB cable, so if you're using Flash drives to load your pics onto it, nothing's happened.  Also, this isn't a new virus we're talking about, so if you have updated anti-viral software on your computer, it's probably already been inoculated. 

Best Buy, which carried the Insignia 10.4, has pulled them from its shelves and website and issued an internal memo stating that customers who bought one will be contacted by letter "once a solution has been tested and confirmed."   We thought we'd go ahead and tell you now, hopefully before you've got a problem.  And c'mon, these guys don't have McAffee? 

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Samsung's quiet Blackjack recall is officially False, but Blackjack problems are True.

It's always the little things that get you, isn't it? 

There's been a rumor over the last few days that Samsung has been executing an under-the-radar recall of the i607 Blackjack for units sold between November 2006 and February 2007 due to persistently dropped calls and poor reception.  The source of the problem is the wee internal antenna, which is coming loose or   breaking off entirely over time due to some strange wear and tear going on inside the phone itself.  Samsung has now released an official statement saying Yes, this is an actual problem, but No, there isn't really a recall.  They've chosen to deal with it on a case-by-case basis.  Wimps.

So, here's the deal.  If your Blackjack i607 has started behaving like a drunken sailor on his third straigt day of shore leave in Amsterdam, open the battery compartment and check the ID sticker for the date in YY MM format in the lower right side.  If it's between 06 11 and 07 02, call Samsung's Exchange by Mail hotline at 1-800-801-1101 and see if they won't give you a replacement phone.  Good luck finding anything in writing on their website, though, outside of their standard warranty agreement.

If Samsung doesn't pony up that new phone and you've got a SquareTrade cell phone warranty on that Blackjack, call us and we'll take care of it.  We tend to honor warranties where others won't.  If you've got a warranty with us and Samsung does replace your phone, be sure to call us to get a refund on the unused portion of your warranty and get the new one covered.

Samsung also mentions that they have "implemented some design changes to fix these issues and there have been no issues with call performance with all new hardware manufactured from and after March 2007."   Let's hear it for stronger glue!

Blackjack warranty, Blackjack insurance

Fix your frozen iPhone.

Roughly 48 hours after news broke that a New Jersey teenager successfully hacked the iPhone and signed up with T-Mobile (effectively breaching Apple's exclusivity deal with AT&T), word came down that modifying your iPhone in such a way would "brick" the iPhone... effectively turning it into a $500 paperweight. That was largely thanks to automatic firmware updates from Apple, incidently.

Now, it has to be noted that a SquareTrade iPhone warranty wouldn't cover software issues. If you were able to find iPhone insurance - which probably costs three times as much - it won't be covered.

That said, we still want to help. Our good friends over at Zolved has posted a step-by-step tutorial on how to reset, restart, and restore your iPhone. There's no guarantee these will work, or that un-bricked iPhones will stay un-bricked past another firmware update, but it won't cost you anything to try.

Of course, the safest thing is to not modify your iPhone, but where's the fun in that?

warranty, squaretrade warranty, square trade warranty