Verizon and T-Mobile Trick More Customers Into Liking Them Than AT&T and Sprint Do...Optimus Prime, Ice Sculpture...DIY iPhone Flash Wins "Most Flagrant Use of Electrical Tape" Award...iPhone Soap, Now Pizza Scented...
J.D. Power & Associates, the well-respected surveyors of customer satisfaction, announced for the umpteenth time that Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile (along with Verizon's newest subsidiary, Alltel) were better at the customer service game than AT&T, which tailed those three, and Sprint, which brought up the rear. Since these standings don't change much from year to year, and since it's clearly not an indication of a carrier's success or failure, we don't post about it. If we did, commenters would just bitch about how badly the winners suck, too. (Yes, that was an invitation.) [MobileCrunch]
Have you ever dreamed of having an Optimus Prime ice sculpture? Me neither, but somebody in Canada did! Gearfuse had very little to say about the origins of this sculpture, posted on Flickr by (from what I could tell) a Toronto-based recording studio. It clearly does not transform (now that would be a post!), though I admit it might be the classiest way for a grown man to celebrate his love of toy robots. [Gearfuse]
Save big with this Samsung sale
If you’re ready to drop some cash on a TV, now’s a great time to do it. You can score the 75-inch Samsung Q70A QLED 4K TV for a whopping $800 off. That knocks the price down to $1,500 from $2,300, which is 35% off. This is a lot of TV for the money, and it also happens to be one of the best 4K TVs you can buy right now, according to Gizmodo.
My hat goes off to Andreas Ødegård, mainly for letting me type those sweet Norwegian letters. In addition, though, Ødegård (there we go again) is a DIY gadget nut who fashioned himself an iPhone/iPod Touch flash out of a Cree emitter, an LED of plentiful brightness. The contraption is not the prettiest, covered as it is with electrical tape, and it's a bit misleading, since its 30-pin connector is apparently only there to hold the thing in place—the Cree gets power from a AA battery. Still, it's a noble remainder, especially since Ødegård (wheeeee!) built v1 in under 10 minutes while watching Scrubs. [Andreas Ødegård (that's four!) via Make]
For a while, rationally exotic scents like Mojito and Tropical Mango were enough for users of iPhone-shaped soaps, and people walked down the street knowing that by stroking themselves repeatedly with their favorite fetish item, they were not just clean but arousingly islandish. But for some, that wasn't enough. They wanted pizza-scented iPhone soap, presumably so that they could smell arousingly like parts of North Jersey. And you know what? God love 'em, that's what they got. [Etsy]