Emergintex

You get to read automated, template’ized emails every now and then and get confused by the wordings, but I got one today which I think was the wrost ever in wording and explaining a process. Take a look:

Hello,

Thank you for using ViaTalk. We appreciate your interest in our business. If you have chosen to cancel before returning your ViaTalk phone adapter, you have been charged a fee of $50. If you are due a refund back, this fee has been taken out of that refund. Shipping & Activation charges are non refundable. The adapter is now yours to keep. Should you decide to return it within 30 days of cancellation, we will refund the $50 charge. If your adapter is not received with all the original parts, cables, wires, and paperwork, the following fees will be retained:

Nothing returned: $50.00
Adapter/router damaged/missing: $50.00
Power adapter damaged/missing: $10.00
Ethernet cable damaged/missing: $5.00
Stand damaged/missing: $10.00
Original box missing: $5.00

Return Equipment To:

ViaTalk Shipping Dept.
5 Corporate Drive
Clifton Park, NY 12065

The way our policy works is that if you cancel within 14 days, you can recoup 100% of your service fees. However, if you cancel after the 14 days, you can only recoup 50% of the unused remaining months. Both of these situations are under the assumption that you return our equipment.

I hope this information was helpful to you, if you have any more questions please feel free to ask.
_
Jason Jackson
ViaTalk Support

Nikon D40

Originally uploaded by R~Grewal

My Gear.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Having used a iPhone for a week or so, I have been missing a lot of functionality, coming from a Windows Mobile device (WM6). I guess I have to face the reality that iPhone is still a multimedia (music & video) device first & then a phone or a productivity device.

The phone part as of now looks ok, with most of the basic features covered. Some basic functionality like transferring Contacts via OBEX using Bluetooth comes to haunt you sometimes. Rarely you will be missing the copy/paste functionality while adding contact information, or copying a contact information from a web-page in Safari and pasting it in the Contacts application.

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Update: This is what you need from Apple:

 

Update: It looks like lots of people are having this problem? I just looked at some analyticals from Google, and it seems lots of people are firing this search 

My iPod Nano used to work with Bose Over Ear headphones perfectly, but why did Apple change the headphone jack on the iPhone!?!

iPhone headphone jack doesnt take the Bose Over Ear headphone nicely, the jack is a bit longer than the normal, hence the earphones dont work.

:(

Navizon unveiled the software only positioning system for mobile phones, which works on iPhone and integrates with Google Maps on iPhone.

The software works by triangulating the GSM cell tower signals to find your location. Also, the software uses something I havent heard of before, wifi-triangulation from existing known Wi-fi access points.

The app itself is very simple, It tries to triangulate your location, and once it finds your best possible location, sends out the lat & long co-ords to GMap and launches GMap, centered on your location.

Not sure how this app, would perform while driving, where there is a constant handover from cell to cell.

for me the first attempt yielded best positioning, but after that it kinda thew me on an Interstate (I-90).

More later.

Technorati tag: iphone GPS

Currently Google Maps are working well on iPhone. Much better than Youtube. Om confirms this here.

 

I have been using Google Maps from day one on iPhone, but there are some missing things, which you would expect on a devoce that is launched in era of 2007. Apple should have implemented better usage of Bluetooth, and possibly given a feature to hook up a GPS device via Bluetooth to drive Google Maps. It is kinda painful to scroll, and zoom using multi-touch while driving, to find exactly where you are at the moment.

Hoping that improvements in bluetooth implementation brings in this functionality soon in iPhone.

Â

I took the plunge from migrating from WM6 to iPhone. I think I couldnt resist the clever price drop on the iPhones, and plunged in with a 4GB for $299.

I have had this immense sense of questioning whenever I had decided to buy anything from Apple. Be it a Mac book, or an iPhone. How much I can achieve doing on devices from Apple, coming from Windows background. I have had a WM5 (and recently WM6) device for almost 2 years (moved from Symbian 6.x) and I was completely satisified with the WM device I owned. It gave me a sense of freedom to do what I really want to do, and if something is not possible, write your own solution. 

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Everyone who got off the sinking ship named SunRocket (ok, the doomed rocket), saw ViaTalk as one of the rescue boats to jump onto.

It seems that ViaTalk got the major chunk of ex-SunRocket customers, so much so that to get a ViaTalk package you had to order it online, since the telephone lines were all busy. It seems that to talk to ViaTalk customer service you had to wait a long long time. You would usually be customer number 80 if you called the support line.

Well the above experience was expected and justified by the ViaTalk officials, since they were just flooded with calls from potential new customers.

But, even today, after about 2 months of the SunRocket departure, the support and Customer Service at ViaTalk is ‘busy’. I had filed in 6 support requests (after I became a ViaTalk customer), and none were replied to until yesterday. The Support staff chose to reply to issues which were solved by themselves (due to the timeline), but still I have 2 open issues, which are CRITICAL for me. The staff, when stumbled on these 2, chose to be silent again!

This is ridiculous. I know you guys are busy, or ‘were’ busy, but 2 months? 2 months to get to a couple of issues? That is not customer service.

Problem, I guess is that all the VoIP explosion around had brought down the customer service level. Companies are being formed on the blink of the eye (TeleBlend for example, though I know parent companies of TeleBlend are much much older and veterans). Companies are crashing, and in all this the customer service is really really affected.

At the end of the day, I still have 2 CRITICAL issues opened with ViaTalk for almost 2 months now, which are yet to be acknowledged.

EDIT: It seems that both the remotes shown below are running on the same technology, provided by tvCompass. Acoustic Research has partnered with tvCompass on their remote.

Gone are the days of Universal Commanders, and in comes the Wi-fi remotes.

These new generation remotes, ride on your Wi-Fi to get various external feeds like TV listings, News etc.

We were aware of one such company in Chicago-land area, TVCompass, who were coming out with the Wi-fi smart Remote (shown on the left) but today at CEDIA-2007 Acoustic Research unveiled their Wi-Fi remote (shown on the right), which I must say has a lot of resemblance with the TVCompass remote.

                                                      

The opportunities in this arena are begining to unfold now. Getting your devices controlled from a single remote is the basic feature, but these remotes can open up areas for other content developers. Getting personalized feeds on your remote, emails clients thrown on the remote etc.

Time to give the remote some respect!