If the two of you would consider focusing on critiques of apps, devices and vendors in preference to critiques of one another, that might help. Throwing around munged variants of handles, claiming folks are spamming, etc. is pointless.
FWIW, I may well have been the first to point out that the 7" flyer was available at a very interesting price point of 300, a few weeks after the Touchpad price cuts.
As far as tone change, I think a series of things has happened in the last 6 months:
- the app store opened months ago, and there are still very few available apps
- BN has munged a number of very high-profile apps - Epicurious and apparently now Scrabble
- another software release came, and brought very little of value to customers in terms of new functionality (it brought something of value to BN, subscriptions to more-expensive magazines)
- there have been decisions getting made that make new customers feel that they've been ripped off, unless they see the explanation - the change from a 5G user / 1G data partition to a 1G user / 5 G data partition scheme has not been explained well, judging by the confusion posters here have around the change.
- Personally, I was bothered by the particular example of BN ignoring mail from a customer with a disability who was trying to get explanations of very simple stuff (how can a person with no right arm mobility turn pages easily from the left side? It's simple, the gesture is there, but BN support was nonresponsive, to the point where the poster thought that new development was needed.)
- The rollout of 1.2, the problems it created for some folks' wireless, BN not communicating that well internally and not making a supported fix available for months - that was handled incredibly poorly.
- obviously, for me personally, the continuing failure to deliver a viable landscape mode for reading books is an annoyance.
- ebook pricing for non-agency press books. BN is charging a very large markup on books from academic presses, for instance. I've posted concrete examples before, but look at Norman Cohn's work from the Oxford University Press - BN wants twice as much money as Amazon does. And this is a pattern I've seen on several occasions when looking for a book from a non-agency (esp. academic) press. A premium for being BN is one thing; 20 bucks for a book I can get for 10 elsewhere is another.
- no Spanish language interface on the NC, after patting itself on the back for the Spanish language ebook selection. And the Spanish language ebook selection's pretty weak, weaker than Amazon's - I have a list around of many books from many authors, originally published in Spanish, and their availability on the two sites. Amazon's doing a better job. BN is doing a better job translating romance novels.
All of that, together with the device itself having become older and still relatively expensive technology is not going to add up to the level of enthusiasm the device had 6 months ago. Folks were hoping for a device from a fairly responsive company; what we have is a device which is great if you're prepared to do a lot of self-service; stock, it's a pretty good e reader and a pretty lousy tablet.
At 135-150 for a refurb it's a good buy. At 250 for a new device, it'd be an outlay I'd regret making today. It's certainly not an outlay I regret having made up front, and I'm glad that people continue to find the information at http://nookworks.blogspot.com to be useful.
I think the real attitude hammer dropped with the update to 1.3 and the price drop on the Touchpad to 100 bucks. The update was 'meh' and the pricing on the NC became obviously off kilter.
