May 11
MattGeneral
Maybe I’m out of touch.
I heard a radio ad this morning proclaiming a new great benefit for Delta customers who get a Delta Premier American Express something-or-other card. Ooh, a great new benefit…I like the sound of that. Ready for this great new benefit:
“If you sign up for the credit card and become a member, your 1st piece of luggage is free!”
Impressive. This is a head-scratcher for me. I haven’t traveled via airplane much recently but I know that everyone is charging for luggage and everything else. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before I’m required to bring my Fastlane transponder with me on the plane so that when they fly through the new floating air tollbooths I can get charged appropriately.
It’s one thing to raise prices and charge for everything and give me some reason. At least you are pretending to be “honest” with me. It’s another thing to pretend that you are actually going out of your way for the customer while treating us like we’re complete idiots.
It would sort of be like Apple saying that they’ve invented this new great feature for their iPhone OS called “Multi-tasking”.
Look, run your business. Do what you need to do. Don’t treat me like an idiot and pretend like you’re doing me any favors with your faux-addon-benefits which were part of the “ah, yeah, obviously that’s included” category not too long ago.
By the way, I’d rather pay $250 for my ticket and have my luggage travel for free than $200 and then have to pay $50 for my luggage. Then I don’t feel like I’m being nickel and dimed.
May 02
MattNerdery
I have owned my new phone for just over 24 hours and where I probably shouldn’t say it’s the best phone ever, I will.
I had been using a Blackberry Storm prior to last night’s purchase of HTC’s Droid Incredible. This was my first experience with the phone:
My wife and I were on our way to see a community theater production in Concord, MA. We were at the Verizon store and were going to finish there and head right to the theater. The salesperson at the store handed me the Incredible after she had tranferred my contacts.
I found the search “fixed” button and typed the name of the theater company. I got the Google search results, touched the Map link and then the Navigation link. Just like that, I had turn-by-turn navigation to the theater. This whole process for me took less time than it took to type this paragraph. I had no documentation and had not used the phone.
It was intuitive and fun and cool.
2 phones ago I had an iPhone. I never really fell in love with it. That was at the beginning of it’s run. I know it’s much better now. The Storm was great for email but lacked the coolness or application support that I know the iPhone has. I wanted something in the middle and I think it has arrived.
It’s a geeky-fun phone that doesn’t feel like it’s meant for geeks. The Android Marketplace has all the apps I need, for free…I feel like I have a phone that will literally do everything I need it to do and I don’t feel dirty because I’m not supporting Apple’s closed “We know better than you” platform (I am writing this on my iPad so I still feel a little dirty).
Love it.
The name is awful. I actually felt embarrassed when I showed people today and they asked what it was called. The phone is the best out there for me. Until it isn’t.
I think I’ll change my name to Matt Awesome.
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