Tuesday, April 9, 2013

The Fine Art of Corporate Fibbing

Word has it that the good folks at Google's Device Support hotline (1-855-836-3987) are still telling people who call in to complain about the wifi and bluetooth issues with their Nexus 4 phones one of two little white whoppers:

  • (Imagine a voice on the telephone expressing the deepest of surprise) "Really? There are no reports of any wifi problems like that for the Nexus 4. Would you like to exchange your phone for a new one?" Or,
  • (Imagine a voice on the telephone expressing the deepest of regret) "Oh, we are so sorry.  If that happened to me I'd be very concerned too! But tragically, that was intended functionality of the phone. We designed it so that you could not use wifi and bluetooth at the same time.
In the mean time, a developer over at XDA has provided a kernel that includes a new beta release of the Nexus 4 Qualcomm Prima wifi driver code that completely fixes the first bug, above, that Google has never heard of. I'm running the latest nightly CyanogenMod 10.1 release with this kernel, and it completely fixes this problem (that Google has never heard about).

Also, as I write this the CyanogenMod developers are integrating the new Qualcomm Prima driver code into their nightly builds, so that this bug (which Google has never heard about) will soon be fixed there as well.

Regarding the intended functionality bug that prevents the N4 from being able to run wifi and bluetooth at the same time [note that this only happens when you are connected to a wifi access point running at 2.4 GHz; if your wifi access is running at 5 GHz you do not experience this bug] there has not been even a whisper that anyone is looking at this.

What I find amazing is that Google has been given a free pass on these little corporate fibs. Nobody has called them on it.  I guess I'm still naive after all these years; I confess to have been completely fooled, snookered, suckered, taken in hook, line, and sinker regarding Google's corporate motto. 

“War is peace. 
Freedom is slavery. 
Ignorance is strength.” 
― George Orwell, 1984

"Lying is not Evil."
― Google, 2013

--Doug