My Effect on the Class Action Lawsuit Against Verizon?
I'm *not* credit-claiming here, okay? I'm just wondering out loud about something I can't help but notice: The use of the word "crippled" being used consistently in articles, most recently by the Wall Street Journal, about the class action lawsuit filed against Verizon for false advertising of the Bluetooth capabilities of the Motorola v710.
Within hours of the v710 being available, a coworker picked it up from Radio Shack. Being a Mobile Geek, within moments I was testing it to see what Bluetooth profiles it supported and when I found out it didn't support file transfer, I announced that it was "crippled" here in this blog. There's lots of mobile geeks out there that would've noticed the same thing right away, but I would like to think that my knowledge of other Moto phones' capabilities and my understanding of what Bluetooth can and can't do, I was able to confidently state that the functionality of this phone had been purposefully disabled (though at first, I thought it didn't support DUN either). I was the absolute first person in the world - outside of Moto and Verizon - to notice this and to write about it. I was annoyed (rightfully), so I used the word "crippled" to describe it.
Yes the word "crippled" is common, but so is the word "disabled". I wonder if I set a tone for this product which snowballed into a class action lawsuit? If I had written instead, "Unsurprisingly, Verizon has disabled the Bluetooth file transfer ability on the v710. This makes sense considering their history of tight control over their handsets. Most CDMA operators, I'm sure, will do the same." Would that have negated the drumbeat of pissed off Verizon customers? I may have written exactly that, actually, if I hadn't made the mistake about the dial-up-networking support.
I wonder this because my blog has been so prominent in web searches and more importantly linked to constantly by the raving mobile hoards of Howard Forums. My one post about this has 450 comments and counting and received tens of thousands of page views since it was first published back in August of last year.
I'm just wondering. Hey, it probably would've happened with or without me - I'm trying not to make the same mistake of my Shuffle/Chasm post. But I can't help but to feel that I had some impact on this process.
-Russ