No Such Thing As A Bad Review?

By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

If there is no such thing as bad advertising, does that mean there are no bad reviews as well? That is probably stretching it, especially if your read Joel Spolsky’s review of the Power Vision Network from Sprint and the LG Fusic phone.

Over the last six months, Sprint has been trying to get bloggers (like me) to write about their new Power Vision Network by sending us free phones and letting us download music and movies and use the phones for free.

That’s rather nice of them, but honestly, I have a really strong aversion to writing about things just because some PR person wanted me to. Basically, there’s no better way to make me not want to write about something than to ask me to write about it. I accepted the free phone because, gosh, well, it’s a free phone, but I decided that I simply wouldn’t write about it no matter how much I liked it.

As it turns out, I had the opposite problem. The phone they sent me, an LG Fusic, is really quite awful, and the service, Power Vision, is tremendously misconceived and full of dumb features that don’t work right and cost way too much. So I’m going to review the dang phone anyway, even though if anybody from Sprint is paying attention they’re going to lose their lunch and some executive bonehead over there is going to go nuts and I sincerely hope that this doesn’t put an end to the entire free-phones-for-bloggers boondoggle, because I’d hate to get beaten up at Etech next year by all the other bloggers who would hate me for spoiling all the fun. Source: Joel on Software

We Say: Scoble and others say it was a big mistake and you should only send out good products to bloggers, to me the reviewer comes off as being against the phone no matter what. The phone may suck, I don’t know, but I bet there will be plenty of people who like it, different strokes for different folks. They did get people talking about it, and you never know, maybe Sprint realized they were bad and figured lots of bad press was better than none. Gotta get rid of them somehow.