Sprint Skewered by Blogger//When Bribes Bite Back

[BellisimaJ.]

From Cnet today:
Is any publicity really good publicity?
Bolding is mine.

Alpha Blog: CNET's gadget & tech news and opinions blogged by our editors
September 19, 2006, 4:11 PM PDT
When bribing bloggers doesn't pay
Posted by: Molly Wood

Sometimes, when you send out free stuff, you have to pay the piper. Sprint has been, since last January, sending out free cell phones with six months of free service to bloggers, hoping for reviews and/or other publicity in return. (Plus, since the bloggers get to keep the phones, they might even become new customers! Bonus!) By most accounts, the--I'll be generous--marketing push was a decent success, netting almost 400,000 mentions as the result of searches for the "Sprint Ambassador Program." However, an all too unfortunate mention turned up today, on the Joel on Software blog. Joel says he at first refused to write about the free phone just because the PR folks wanted him to--although he did accept the phone, with no intention of ever writing about it. But that was before he used the LG Fusic with Sprint Power Vision service and, per his review, discovered how truly god-awful it really is. The result is a brilliantly vicious skewering that's got to be oh, 3,000 words long or so. Here's my question for Sprint, then: is any publicity really good publicity? Because, dang. Joel hates that free phone

http://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-663...l?tag=blog

An excerpt from Joel's blog:

You can’t see all the icons at once because someone had the bright idea of using a weird 3-D perspective, and the currently selected icon comes zooming out in front, covering up some of the other icons. All the unselected icons are shown in silhouette, so at first they just look like a background. It took me quite a while to figure out just what the menu was and how to find things I wanted from the main menu.

But don’t worry… there are random bits of sparkle that fly around on the screen. That’s the important part. The random bits of sparkle, again, a 6th grader’s BASIC graphics project.

A scathing review for Sprint.


http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/19b.html