My First blog post - Welcome

My First blog post - Welcome 

Hello and welcome to my new blog.

The main intention of this blog, and the entries I'll write for it, is to provide reviews of my experiences with the products and services I encounter and interact with in my daily life.  The focus will be on the overall User Experience - Practical reviews if you like?

Reviews, certainly with respect to a technology gadget, are usually written by a Journalist after spending anything from a few hours to a day or two using a device.  A typical review will comment on the breadth and depth of the device's features offered, the general usability, an assessment of price to performance, it's specification in relation to peer devices, and so on.  By their nature they cannot really provide an insight into how reliable the device is after six months of use; the quality and ease of getting technical support from, or report a bug to, the manufacturer; whether the manufacturer acts on those bug reports; how well the mechanical build quality of the device stands up to ongoing usage, how well any upgrade process works, and so on.  It is these latter points, that I intend to cover.

Like many other blogs I'll probably also post about other various stuff I've done and stuff that is on my mind.
In all cases you're invited to respond via the comments below.

I hope you find my blog posts enjoyable, interesting and useful.  Thank you for reading.
Paul


Some background:
The main motivation behind starting this blog is my current "Smart Phone".  Unfortunately it isn't that smart because there are several significant bugs in it's software that render it unreliable to the point of useless - indeed the opposite of Smart.  All will become clear when I publish my Practical review of it soon.  I did my research before buying it from reviews published by reputable technology websites.  Those reviews gave high praise for it and good ratings, but they were limited to the kind of review I mention above.  They certainly didn't give any indication of the reliability problems I would face after a few months of ownership; and to expect them to is, perhaps, unreasonable due to their very nature.  However the reviews are not updated to give extra information how a device performs outside of the restricted view of the review.

My reviews, written and published after months of use/ownership, rather than around the point a product is launched into general sale, may sound a bit counter intuitive as anyone considering a purchase will have already bought one and by then the product may have been replaced by a newer model.  However I think the reviews will still be useful as an indication of how different companies value things like good design (Mechanical and User Interface), Quality Control, Bug fixing and updates, and the overall User Experience.  They may also be useful to others who have experienced problems with the things I have reviewed and are wondering "Is it me?".

I don't intend for this to be a purely negative affair.  There are devices I have used that demonstrate they were well thought out at the design stage, are reliable, and perform their intended tasks very well.  There are companies that have provided me with good service, perhaps in the course of their business or in resolving a problem I have had with them or a device they have manufactured.  I'll be including Practical reviews of these things too.