Your AT&T bill includes 300 SMS; Verizon doesn’t. You use nights and weekend. Verizon nights start at the late night of 9 p.m. Your apples are not my oranges.

We don’t know what the real numbers will be until people start getting their Android Ultimate bills. The Verizon Wireless website says to expect “add between 6% and 37% to your monthly bill ” but starts listing fees with one over 15%. 6% is right out. I picked 20% as a median.

Past that you say a bunch of irrelevant or contradictory things I don’t disagree with: $3K isn’t that much and someone else might pay; you can tether to read your email from laptop and you don’t use it anyway and the prepay thing isn’t useful. Yes, yes, yes. And this changes the facts how? I just said the shiny thing cost $3K.

The Android Droid costs more the IPhone.

That’s because it’s shinier.

So – shiny toy $300, activation $40, 2 years @ $80/month = $2,260, divided out is just over $3/day. For anyone in the professional/technical world (i.e., the people who are reading your blog) that’s noise-level. Mouse nuts.

Plus, with tethering, you can avoid a lot of travel or casual Internet connection charges where there is no wi-fi or it’s expensive (hotels, airports). The market trend is *away* from desktop/laptop email (which seems to have peaked) and toward ubiquitous, always-connected mobile devices using SMS, IM clients, cloud services, mobile email, notifications, and mobile apps.

(Where prepaid really sucks is data service, which is becoming much more important than voice.)

Second, every patent application gets a rejection. A Rejection is part of a conversation between you and the patent office to determine exactly what is novel and should be covered by a patent. Handling rejections is cheap compared to filing patents.

Third, pursuing patents generally protects your business. It is not the entire business. Go sell.

Finally, there is no way of seeing abandoned patents. The knowledge is kept confidential and thus disappears. I was hoping that the patent office should publish the abandoned patents twenty years after they are filed so the knowledge is never lost.

The “patent pending” claim is correct. There are cheap ways to get the moniker if you wish it.

I would also like to ask how one files for a patent themselves and where the information can be aquired.

Thank you,
Rod Reynolds

Direct connection to the NAS came up with the same problem. Tech support says it’s a bad NIC then and RMA it. I get to keep my drives; they just want the chassis. I paid them 20 US for an advance RMA which is quite reasonable really, especially since they sent it air when it was supposed to be ground. Here’s where the fun starts, though.

I get the RMA unit and it’s an old one. Older than the one I own. You can tell by the serial number. It’s probably refurbished as there are marks on the case. Whatever, I don’t care as long as it works, right. I install my drives, do a factory reset and install the latest firmware. I start to transfer my data to it and…I’ll bet you can guess what happens next. That’s right! Same problem. I run Wireshark again and it shows copious amounts of TCP checksum errors while moving files up to this paperweight.

I e-mail tech support right away and tell them that it does the same thing and that if they can’t fix it, and I don’t have faith that they can, then I want my money back. That was 4 days ago. I have yet to hear anything from them. I believe this is the part where they stonewall the customer. Anyway, I’ve contacted my CC company to see if they can help and they can’t. I just sent an e-mail to the retailer I bought this junk off of and am awaiting their reply. I don’t have much faith that they will be able to do anything. At this point I believe I’m going to end up with a 1500 buck brick sitting in the closet collecting dust.

Charles you’re right. It IS landfill!

I’m having trouble with file transfers to the NV+ from my OpenSuse box. Ran wireshark as support asked and I’m getting TONS of tcp checksum errors. Support says I have to check with another PC so I drag an old box out, install OpenSuse 11.1 and, after a lot of time and hassle, I find transfers are doing the same thing from that box as well. It has a completely different Gigabit NIC so they can’t blame my equipment now. They still want me to do a direct connection to the PC. Reasonable, I guess…it could me my gigabit switch, right???? Not likely. I’m praying it’s a firmware issue or I’ll have to pay a fortune to send it back to them for RMA. Even then what about my data??? And what if they just send it back? I’ve had companies do that before.

When I was looking into this I threw around the idea of building my own, God knows, for the money I could have had a pretty sweet little NAS. But I like the very small power consumption on this. How I wish now that I had just built my own.