Another Watershed Moment in Our Industry

I love Vlingo . I have ever since my Blackberry days. I just recently Purchased Vlingo for Android within the last 3 weeks. I purchased the Blackberry Vlingo aswell. I dont suppose the 9.99 Refund would be in effect would it? Even if the answer is no , i love your product , and will continue to use it , and will continue to tell my friends about it.

I’m very impressed with the vlingo app and especially the small widget on my home screen. I purchased this app a few weeks ago and I’m a little disappointed that I paid 9.99 and every is now getting it for free. Again it’s a great app but It would awesome if it was free.

While some of you have complained about paying for an app that is now free, and while TJ has artfully dodged answering questions about refunds, let me offer a slightly different viewpoint.

When you spent your 9.99 on the app, you had the chance to get a refund if you didn’t like it. Obviously you must have liked it “$9.99 worth” because you kept it. So while it probably “feels bad” that now you could get it for free, you yourself made the value judgement that your money was well spent.

In my area $9.99 gets me a 6-pack of high-end microbrew. I got more value for that $9.99 than I would have from the microbrew, so I don’t think Vlingo was overpriced and I don’t think they owe anyone, including me, a refund.

It works as advertised on my Droid 1. In fact, it works BETTER than advertised now that I have it triggered to run off a long-press of the search key. A couple of additional features I would like to see in future versions are

*update Facebook status hands-free without having to go into the Facebook app or the touch.facebook.com site. I understand Vlingo does this under one or more other operating systems and would like to see it in Android as well.

*ability to create a calendar entry hands-free. The google calendar has a simplified event-creation routine where you type your entry all on one line. The example they give on the google calendar page is “Dinner with Michael 7pm tomorrow.” One would think it would be possible to have Vlingo send that kind of simple text to the calendar app.

I do not agree with your rejection of refund requests. I’m sorry that another company put a crimp in your android revenue plans, but it is unfair to have all users who paid $10 get stuck with the bill, when the app is actually rolling out as a free app. The enticement for early adapters was to pay $9.99 in order to get the application at “half” price of the normal roll out price of $19.99. However, you never charged $19.98 for the app, which was the justification for my becoming an early adapter, ie, to get it for half of what I would have to pay if I waited. In fact, if I would have waited, I would not pay double, I would not pay anything at all. Thus, the basis of getting my early adoptor dollars was untrue. When did you ever increase the price to $20, even if Google had not rolled out their app, you didn’t fullfill your obligation to charge $20. Why didn’t you charge $20? Because you knew just like we knew, that Vlingo was not refined enough yet to charge $20. As a user, I knew right away the application was not up to par, it didn’t function right, but I didn’t request a refund because I figured it was only fair to give you time to work out the kinks since I was getting a deal at $10 less than what I would have to pay later when the app was refined. So I let Vlingo sit on my phone, without using it, and figured I would wait until you improved it enough to make it usable. In the meantime, my loyalty has proven misguided. You rejected my request for a refund.

End of story, you have said it yourself, you are making lemon-aide out of lemons, using android users as testing grounds for all your other mobile phone apps, and so we are useful to you. There is no reason not to refund us our money for something we didn’t receive. In case you need that to be refreshed, we didn’t receive an application at half price as promised.

Jon

Kudos to the developers on a great product! You’ll note that the applause pretty much drowns out the whiners. Keep up the great work. I paid for the app but now that it’s free I still have not one, single regret about having done so. Some of your users need to grow up.

I just entered the world of android phone users. My phone came pre-installed with vlingo. I found out about it because I switched on the swype keyboard, which hooks into it. I used it to chat into an IRCesque program. It wasn’t perfect, but it did a pretty good job. That makes it much more useful to me than the free google alternative. And, as far as “operational” stuff, it did a pretty darn good job. I did have to take to stabs at “find accordion store”, but on the second try, it found the store I wanted it to find.

I propose a revenue model.
A pay pc&mac app that allow you to produce a file to train your vlingo. It would produce a datafile that could be dumped to the phone and get you what you want when you talk. (please make sure your windows app runs in wine, or it will be of no use to me as a linux user otherwise)

Now. For the full $20 app that some of your previous customers were whining about.. I would like some cool programmer toys. Namely, programmers get to type in lots of punctuation, especially us perl programmers. I also have lots of punctuation in my passwords (hurray for strong passwords). I would like a training app that allowed me to give the input text, and read it. Like dragon back in the day, but with my text
So I can say things like
if openparen defined dollarsign this underscore thing closeparen openfroglips
and get
if ( defined $this_thing ) {

I would totally sling you a jackson for that action.
(but if it didn’t work with wine, I would whine and try to get my money back)

Cheers

Absolutely love the product and believe it is the best out there for Androids. Will it be available for tablets?

OK.. I downloaded the app from the market and the first time I tried it with my Jawbone Icon, my Droid crashed after the call completed. The screen went black, no buttons worked, and I had to do a battery pull to get going again. Not good. Also, I got no confirmation of what contact I asked it to dial — Choice Dialer+, the app I’m currently using, confirms first.  I uninstalled Vlingo. Somebody PLEASE do an app that actually WORKS so safe driving can be conducted!