New York Times Link Love
Nice!
You probably haven't noticed (unless you subscribe to my comments feed), but my post about the Motorola v710's Bluetooth being crippled by Verizon has gotten over 185 comments, has been Slashdotted and now has just been linked to by the New York Times in David Pogue's tech column. The original post was from back in August, yet I still get 2-3 posts a day from irate customers and others talking about the situation and exchanging rumors of a fix.
You have to love it when carriers screw up this badly. But after talking to the source, it seems that David's found out there isn't going to be much done about the situation. In fact, this sort of thing is already happening again:
This isn't the first time we've seen product features compromised in the name of copy protection, but it may be the first time it's hit cellphones. (Unfortunately, it seems to be a trend; the Bluetooth of the new BlackBerry 7100 from T-Mobile is disabled in the same ways. "There are two main reasons that drove our decision. First, our engineers design our products with tight security in mind," a spokesman told me, not entirely convincingly. "Second, we try to avoid the tradeoffs that result from cramming unnecessary features into our product.")
Urgh. The "Blueberry" is disabled in the same way? You've got to be kidding me! First every industry pundit around claims that Bluetooth is dead. Then it becomes very useful and starts to spread - and then the carriers make a concerted effort to kill it. Dumb. They can't put the toothpaste back into the bottle and all they're doing is pissing off customers.
And people think WiFi-enabled mobile phones will be coming soon? Not a chance.
-Russ