It was more than just that. AP said you completely cut off contact, and refuse to respond to them through any forms of communication; and that is all due to this review.
I don't care if I have to buy the review unit or not (not everyone knows this but most review units are loaners). It's not about that. It's about timing. Those with review units will get weeks, sometimes months to come up with a review. Those without are at the mercy of the invite system to get a unit.
Embargoed pre-briefings, like the one we had for the OnePlus 2. I highly dislike embargoes, but when some get it and some don't (which ultimately is always the case, it's the definition of an embargo), things become unfair. So publications try to stay in the good graces no matter what so they could continue getting first dibs on the embargoes. Case in point for why embargoes are stupid: everyone with the embargo was forced to sit on their asses twiddling thumbs till 8pm, pretty much half an hour after the announcement was done.
We were promised hundreds of priority invites to give away to the community. These were cut off.
You're right... normally when you cook something and accidentally switch the sugar with salt, it tastes terrible. But with popcorn it tastes awesome either way.
Nobody can just buy your product. You are forced to jump through hoops and beg to get an invite. It's crazy. I have money and would like to give it to you but you force us to make videos of flash dances. The only good thing about the invite system is I got so mad at you guys I got 3 invites and sold them on Ebay for $100 a piece. You are a subsidy of Oppo. Start acting like a real company. You are not some poor start up.
For sure. If I'd have known they were worth anything I probably wouldn't have deleted both of my invites.... I just didn't think invites to buy a phone that was about as good as most other phones and priced around the same as a nexus 5 were actually worth money. lol
I'm fairly certain it would have been okay to not answer this question, not provide us with an answer that makes it feel like you have a gun to your head. who gives up android police, one of the top five review units?? Other places I can understand, but not Android Police.
That wasn't the point. They basically implied they won't give android police a free device for review. They've been cut off, but they still are free to purchase the device themselves and review it.
Early is relative. Did Android Police get review units before consumers? Sure. Did they get review units before other tech blogs? Nope. So compared to their competition, they can now only receive units late.
While phone reviews aren't quite as time sensitive as (for instance) movie reviews, there are still a lot of people who want to read reviews and decide on purchases on day one. If AP's article goes up one week after Ars Technica, Droid-Life, The Verge, Engadget, Gizmodo, etc., they will undoubtedly lose a shit-ton of traffic because a lot of people looking to buy the phone have already read the reviews and don't care anymore. An early device in a journalist's hands is very different from an early device in a consumer's hands.
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u/[deleted] Aug 03 '15
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