So it's the day after Christmas and I'm sitting here with a cup of coffee that's gone lukewarm, staring at a pile of gadget boxes and receipts I need to deal with before the return windows close. This is basically my favorite unofficial holiday. Boxing Day sales, the great gadget shuffle, everybody quietly returning the thing their aunt bought them for something they actually wanted.
My brother-in-law got a Kindle Fire under the tree, which is funny because I told him back in November it was basically $199 well spent as a media consumption slab and not much else. He's already complaining the browser (Silk, they call it) feels sluggish scrolling through anything image-heavy. I warned him. Still glad he didn't spring for something pricier and regret it more.
Best Buy had some decent doorbusters again this morning — a handful of HDTVs that were gone by 7:15am according to a guy I know who actually stood in line for one, and a bunch of accessory clearance stuff that's honestly where the real deals are. Cases, chargers, screen protectors, all 40-50% off. Nobody wants that stuff in a gift box on the 25th but two days later it's exactly what you need because you just got a new phone and your case situation is a disaster.
Speaking of new phones: if you unwrapped an iPhone 4S yesterday, congrats, you're now the fourth person in my immediate family asking Siri dumb questions at dinner. It's a neat trick for about a week. My mother asked it if it could hear Steve Jobs, which, I mean, rough, Mom, but also very on-brand for her. That whole thing back in October still feels weirdly recent every time somebody brings it up.
If instead you got an Android phone with Ice Cream Sandwich already on it, or you're one of the lucky Galaxy Nexus people, hang onto that smugness while you can. It's a genuinely nice update, the whole interface feels more grown-up than Gingerbread did. But do yourself a favor and go check whether Carrier IQ is buried on your device before you get too comfortable. That whole rootkit-logging mess has been dragging on for weeks now and carriers still won't give a straight answer about who's running it and why. I spent about forty minutes over the weekend digging through settings menus on three different phones just to feel like I'd checked. Mostly it just made me paranoid, not reassured.
Anyway. Returns and exchanges. A few actual tips since I've done this dance more than once:
- Keep every box, cable, and manual until you're sure you're keeping the thing. Retailers are getting stricter about "like new" condition for post-holiday returns, especially on tablets and laptops.
- If you're exchanging at a carrier store instead of returning to a big box retailer, budget an hour minimum. The lines today are worse than Black Friday, just less dramatic, more just tired parents standing around.
- Gift receipts get you store credit, not cash, at basically everywhere I checked this year. Plan accordingly if what you really wanted was the money.
- Restocking fees are still a thing on opened electronics at some places. Fifteen percent stung a friend of mine who opened a laptop, decided the screen was too glossy, and tried to take it back two days later.
I also want to say something about all the SOPA hearing coverage that's been clogging up my RSS reader the past week and a half. I know it's not strictly a "gadget" story, but if you care at all about the internet not getting weirder and more locked down, it's worth fifteen minutes to actually read what the bill would do instead of just retweeting outrage about it. The committee hearings a couple weeks back got pretty heated, and this isn't going away just because everyone's distracted by wrapping paper right now.
Going to go stand in a return line now. Wish me luck, and if anyone from Best Buy is reading this, the guy in the blue vest at the register yesterday who rolled his eyes at my little sister for asking a totally reasonable question about her new earbuds — you know who you are, and it wasn't that busy, you had time to be nicer about it.