Like many of you, I imagine, I drooled over David Pogue’s description of the Novatel MiFi 2200. It’s a little miracle machine that creates an instant Wi-Fi hotspot as you move around. It will be available on May 17.
So upon reading said column, I headed over to the Web site of the wireless service provider, Verizon Wireless, to put in my preorder. And, nothing. Zero. Nothing on the home page. Nothing when you put “MiFi” into the search box. A total and complete absence of information. A press release turned up eventually, but it too didn’t explain how to order the product in advance, the way you can with new Kindles and plenty of other big-league consumer products with launch dates that are months away.
All this left me utterly baffled. If you’re going to go to the trouble of handing a reporter a product to review, shouldn’t you expect that customers who like the sound of it are going to come looking for information? Fine, perhaps Novatel didn’t warn Verizon Wireless (neither company wanted to talk much about the snafu) that the review was coming, and thus Verizon had no time to create a preordering system.
But still, slap a product description up on your Web site. Apologize for the lack of preordering. And take my e-mail address and inform me when I can order the thing, rather than putting the onus on me to keep checking back. It would be nice to think that someone at either company has developed a clue about how to make nice to customers who desperately want to hand over their money.
So upon reading said column, I headed over to the Web site of the wireless service provider, Verizon Wireless, to put in my preorder. And, nothing. Zero. Nothing on the home page. Nothing when you put “MiFi” into the search box. A total and complete absence of information. A press release turned up eventually, but it too didn’t explain how to order the product in advance, the way you can with new Kindles and plenty of other big-league consumer products with launch dates that are months away.
All this left me utterly baffled. If you’re going to go to the trouble of handing a reporter a product to review, shouldn’t you expect that customers who like the sound of it are going to come looking for information? Fine, perhaps Novatel didn’t warn Verizon Wireless (neither company wanted to talk much about the snafu) that the review was coming, and thus Verizon had no time to create a preordering system.
But still, slap a product description up on your Web site. Apologize for the lack of preordering. And take my e-mail address and inform me when I can order the thing, rather than putting the onus on me to keep checking back. It would be nice to think that someone at either company has developed a clue about how to make nice to customers who desperately want to hand over their money.
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