Wednesday, January 16, 2013

400,000 Lemons

According to numerous reports, Google has sold approximately 400,000 Nexus 4 phones to date.

And according to this Google bug report forum post from a Google device software developer, all 400,000 must have been sold with a buggy Qualcomm wifi driver that basically bricks the phone whenever the screen is blanked when connected via wifi.

Now we discover, according to this article, that the phone's manufacturer has already stopped producing the Nexus 4 to gear up to manufacture successor Nexus phone products.  LG, of course, denies that they are stopping production of the Nexus 4.

Seriously?

Google sold 400,000 lemons, which still aren't working properly due to a buggy wifi driver, as well as staffing a lackluster/inconsistent/autistic/tone-deaf device support system within Google, and Google is planning to just move on? The Google bug report forum mentioned above now has 600 complaints, mostly about faulty wifi behavior on the Nexus 4.  And these complaints date back to November 20, 2012.

Seriously?

This is the kind of behavior that could give a company a bad name.

--Doug
doug@parrot-farm.net

2 comments:

  1. There isn't much there support can say - we know it is a bug. The issue is whether it will be fixed soon, i.e. with 4.2.2.

    I applaud you for getting mad - Android users should get mad at being treated like beta testers - but I think some of your language is 'inflated' and that doesn't help: it doesn't 'brick' the phone as far as I can tell.

    The truth is that 4.2.0 and 4.2.1 were beta quality at best. For Google to push them out to all users is insulting.

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  2. It actually sounds like at least two bugs, 4:17pm. If I were guessing I'd say that it was an Android bug that was causing the problems with the Nexus 4, 7, and 10 connecting to a wifi access point. The wifi dropoff behavior when the screen is blanked appears to be unique to the N4, and is probably caused by a buggy Qualcomm driver, as the Google developer indicated.

    What I find irritating is the completely unprofessional response of the Google Device Support team. At first, they were completely ignorant of the problem in spite of it having been reported since November 20, 2012. Then, they tried to pass off obviously buggy behavior as a "feature", all the while still RMA'ing N4's whenever anyone called to complain that their wifi was not working properly.

    Even Microsoft has better customer support than Google.

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