I hate it when I see s price for something I’ve decided I’m going to buy and then when I get to the store, it’s not the same price. This was the case last night as my wife and I arrived at our local Best Buy store to purchase an iPod touch for her. But we found a way to save the money and get her iPod touch without any arguments, threats, hassles, or even coupons. Right after paying, I told her I really should share this with my readers in hopes that some of you can save a few bucks.
Buying Online Is Cheaper
My wife had poked around looking at prices and found that Best Buy had a decent price ($354.99) on the 64GB iPod Touch (3rd Generation) she wanted. She called me up and we agreed to head over there before dinner. After work, I picked her up and we went to the Best Buy to find that they had her iPod, but in the store, it was the same price as at the Apple store and other retailers. At $399.99, it was $45 more than we expected. While that’s not going to break the bank, I’m not eager to throw away $45. So I pulled out my iPhone, loaded up the Best Buy web site, and found the same product in the online store for the price she saw earlier in the day. Then I noticed the “Online only price” in red letters near the price. Although I found a way around that at that moment, it wasn’t until today that I noticed that the product listing on the FULL version of the site did not have this “online only price” notice like the mobile version of the site, which seems a little tricky to me, but is likely just a mistake.
(Click either image below to see the full size)
Full Site
Mobile Site
How We Saved Money
Not one to just give up, I asked the employee working the MP3 player section if we could just buy online and then use the in-store pick up option. As I was showing him the price online on my iPhone, he pointed out the “online only” notice and said that he was pretty sure we wouldn’t be able to but we could check with customer service. Of course, we checked with customer service and they said we could. At my request, she was nice enough to check inventory and let us know there were plenty in the store to buy, so we bought one using my iPhone. There’s a 45 minute wait for the order to be completed and brought to the pickup area, so we went to dinner and came back to complete a purchase, having saved the money we had hoped to save.
Knowing what we now know, we would have placed the order from a computer at home just because it’s faster and easier to fill out all the information, but otherwise, it was a pretty painless experience and we never even had to try and convince anyone we should get the online price or have any uncomfortable discussions about why the price is different. And really, I understand the reasoning but was pleased to find a way to have my cake and eat it, too.
What’s The Lesson Here?
Although this is specific to our scenario at Best Buy with this product, the lesson to be learned extends to any consumer activity and could be applied to car purchases easily. Don’t be afraid to look for ways to get the price you want. There’s no reason to not look at your purchase from every angle, compare prices, and ask questions. You never know when it’ll save you a few bucks.
This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of LG Chocolate Touch. All opinions are 100% mine.
Last week, I got an LG Chocolate Touch in the mail to review. You’ve probably seen a commercial for it featuring musical artist, Ciara. The commercials have really been pushing the sound quality of this phone, so I decided to make that the focus of my review while still touching on everything else you look at in a phone.
Sound Quality Worth Bragging About
Fresh out of the box, my objective was to get my own music onto the phone. I plugged it in and in no time, I was moving over music. With a microSD card, there was plenty of space, so I moved over a bunch of music to test with. Honestly, LG makes some nice hardware, but I didn’t expect a lot in the way of audio quality from a cell phone. Somehow, though, they managed to get really clean sound and despite my expectations, I could tell the difference in audio clarity between the Chocolate Touch and other phones. My iPhone, for example, has pretty good audio for listening to music through my headphones, but the music playing through my LG seemed to have more depth to it.
More Music Features
Like most music players, the one in the LG lets you poke around for an artist, album or track and has all the standard functions, but it goes beyond that. LG wants people to know this is a phone with music on its mind, so they included a Dolby Mobile equalizer with a handful of presets as well as the option of a manual equalizer. Choosing Bass Boost and then switching to Voice Boost, I could hear a clear change and Voice Boost made my first test song sound a lot better than without it. They also added Rhythmical Beat (the phone vibrates to the beat), Visual Effect (some nice background movement) and Join the Band. Join the Band is a pretty unique feature I haven’t seen before. You can choose between a drum set and a scrolling keyboard to play music along with the currently playing track. When I tried it, it didn’t sound too great because I can’t hold a beat, but if you’re more musically inclined, this is a cool way to remix while you listen. Either way, it was a lot of fun to play along and be a part of the music.
Your music can be managed, too. The added ability to create and manage music library and playlists is a nice step up from the standard player functionality. The Chocolate Touch also kept with the originality by adding an FM tuner with Verizon’s song identification software. I think more phones should offer this and was glad to see it included.
Touch Screen, Design, and Usability
Opening the box, I found a phone oozing style. The red pillow it was on felt like a red carpet. The phone, itself is incredibly good looking with various shaped buttons and a smoky-steel exterior. A little smaller than an iPhone, it feels comfortable in your hand and all the buttons are in convenient places. The back plate is an extension of the rock-star look LG was aiming for (and nailed). It looks like someone spilled gray paint on it, but in a good way, and just in case gray isn’t your color, they threw in a purple back plate as well. Finally, the thing is almost soft, which is kind of calming.
The touch screen required more force than I’m used to or would prefer to make anything happen. Re-calibrating seemed to help a little, but I still had to work just a little harder to select things. That said, the interface seems to be designed to minimize the amount of poking at the screen that would need to be done in order to get to what you want. Beneath the back plate and under the battery was the microSD. I prefer it in a more accessible location, but that’s at the risk of it popping out and getting lost.
This phone also comes with a 3.2 megapixel camera. The camera software is adaptive to the photo being taken and will adjust for too little or too much light. I liked that because I could get a photo of my monitor and it adjusted to be perfectly readable.
Conclusion
The LG Chocolate Touch is a wonderful touch screen phone with some incredible features if your music is important to you while on the go. Just the design and the music features would be enough to help me get used to the touch screen and for the price, it’s a really good alternative to other phones that are battling to unseat the iPhone.
After my last post, I’ve been itching to make another video post. Last night, it all just fell in my lap while perusing HackADay.com. A recent post there, “Multitouch project roundup” talks about the many variations of multi-touch devices people are building in response to Microsoft Surface and the technology that preceded it. The problem with surface and some multi-touch implementations is that Surface will undoubtedly be out of your price range and mine and other DIY implementations have appeared daunting and still fairly expensive to pull off. Last night, one implementation, called mtmini, stood out from the crowd as a relatively simple and very inexpensive multi-touch project, so I decided that I just had to try it.
Below is the video, summarizing the creation of the multi-touch interface and some demonstration of it in use. I’m still working on my editing skills and the interface could use some fine-tuning, but I was pleased to have it actually working without a lot of effort. If you want to skip the building and commentary, jump to 3:26 in the video. It is also worth noting that Logitech didn’t have XP drivers for the camera I originally mounted in the box, so I ended up pulling that out and using a WebCam Live instead.
By all means, feel free to link to this post or share, embed, or link to the video on YouTube. Try to make one, yourself using either my method or the original (non-desk) method and post a link to your results here.
