Hyperjuice 2 External Battery Pack for your Mac

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I got the newest HyperJuice external battery pack in the other day to add to my road-warrior kit.  I've hacked up a MacBook Pro power adapter for use, and so far so good - more details to be provided in My MacLife section next week.

This portable power pack is powerful enough to charge a MacBook, and two tablets (iPads, etc) at the same time.

Other hyperjuice products coming soon as well - let me know if you want to see any other product lines from HyperJuice reviewed.

Review of course forthcoming, so check back soon for my initial impressions.

Beware the Freedom Pop

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Freedom Pop Hotspot

A few weeks ago, I bought into the Freedom Pop free 500 Mb hotspot device.  It took about 2 weeks to get it, and I only really started using it a few days ago.  Look how much I got 'charged' one day of turning it on.

This was from light web surfing and mostly doing work - does something smell fishy to you?  It does to me.

I was working on Office Documents Mostly... Does this look right to you?Anyway, they automatically start charging 'top offs' at $10 per gb.  I've already got charged $30 on a 'free' plan just testing the service out.

If I were you, I'd stay away from Freedom Pop.  But if you are wanting to try it out, make sure you read their usage terms which pretty much teachs us that you can't get something for nothing (other than the $49/$99 fee plus shipping).

Amazon Refund To Closed Account?

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This all started back around Christmas 2011.  I bought a camera on Amazon.com, and then ended up returning it because it didn't suit my needs.  The problem was that I had closed my account on Wells Fargo shortly after buying it, and the original Amazon.com policy is to refund back only to the original card.

So fast forward to 2012 February, the refund gets processed.  Of course, I ask Amazon to please just give me store credit instead of trying to process the refund.  Unfortunately it was a no go, and they told me to please contact my bank or to expect a check refund from the bank.  Well I can tell you after several months, none of that happened.

I finally just went to Wells Fargo yesterday and asked someone to look all this up for me.  It turns out they wipe their records clean after X number of months so they have absolutely nothing on the computer system for me.  The rep also said there would be no way a refund / credit would have been processed after the account was closed.  I didn't want to call him a liar but Wells Fargo had been a pretty shady bank to me over the years.

So I went back online and contacted Amazon.com for some assistance - via email.  Their response was the same, so naturally I filled out the feedback form and let them know what I thought about their policy.  They asked me to give them a chance to correct it and offered to have them call me immediately to resolve.

25 minutes on the phone, and its finally resolved.  Most of it was just waiting for their team to figure out a way to process the refund to me - store credit isn't possible, but a work-around was.  Basically they would refund an amount from a previous order to my account.

All-in-all, Amazon did not lose me as a customer.  Amazon and Costco rank right up there for me in customer service and it's still my favorite place to shop.