The iPad’s a confirmed success. Apple can’t make the things fast enough, and they’re vanishing from shelves worldwide. Another thing that’s vanished is the ‘pad’ jokes, comparing Apple’s device to sanitary products. This sort of thing tends to be the case when a device is successful—the same thing happened to the Wii.
What’s more interesting is how ‘pad’ now might become a generic term over ‘tablet’ for similar devices. Engadget reports that HP’s filed for the PalmPad trademark and Pocket-lint notes that RIM’s grabbed Blackpad.com.
These might be defensive moves, but perhaps these companies are bright enough to take advantage of Apple’s branding success, using names that would immediately get consumers thinking of the iPad, but selling devices that are more ‘open’ or more geared towards enterprise. That said, don’t expect Microsoft to reveal the Windows PhonePad 7 any time soon.
On the Societal Web, Alison McClintock examines the reasoning behind modern corporations using software to find disgruntled customers online. As she rightly points out: “There’s no such thing as a lone complaint in cyberspace and businesses of any size and sector should take note.”
I agree with this, and it’s interesting to see this modern take on customer service in action. I’ve bitched about various companies on Twitter, and had responses from support teams, leading to swift resolutions, which is great. There are, however, two problems. The first is when a company’s systems aren’t fully integrated. It’s great for someone to reply to you on Twitter within five minutes, but decidedly less great when they tell you to email a certain address and you don’t get a response. Secondly, if this process is being automated—as is increasingly common—everything goes wrong very quickly.
Recently, I said something on Twitter about the BBC licence fee costing less per month than the standing charges on my BT bill. Taking that text in context, there’s no reason for any company to respond to me. Sure enough, though, a BT ‘bot’ chirpily replied to the tweet, asking me if I needed help with my bill. This is a nuisance, and shows that, as with any other area of customer care, you actually have to take care to make it work. Scouring the internet and helping customers is a good thing; having bots run rampant and respond to vague keywords in an out-of-context manner is not.
Hat tip: Ian Betteridge.
BBC News reports that a UK judgement has ruled what it calls ‘game copiers’ for the Nintendo DS illegal. This means under British law the import of the likes of the R4 is now no longer legal. The court noted: “The mere fact that the device can be used for a non-infringing purpose is not a defence”, adding that “game copiers first circumvent Nintendo’s security systems before any non-infringing application can be played on Nintendo’s handheld products”.
This is a pretty interesting judgement, and one that will go a long way to giving the fair-use brigade a solid kick in the teeth. Got an R4 and use it to carry multiple games with you that you own a copy of, because you don’t want to cart around £200 of DS games and leave them on a bus by mistake? Tough. Use your R4 for emulation and homebrew? Tough.
And how long before this judgement creeps into other areas of digital media? If R4s are now dubbed ‘game copiers’, are CD-Rs ‘music copiers’, and DVD-Rs ‘movie copiers’? Perhaps it’s time to ban paper (‘magazine copiers’) too, along with hard drives (‘everything copiers’). And good luck, iOS device jailbreakers and ‘hackers’ of other consoles—if the R4′s now illegal because it circumvents a system’s security, it’s only a matter of time before other media giants clamp down on anyone who has the audacity to want to fiddle about with a piece of tech kit they’ve paid out money from their own pockets for. The bastards.
