I just wandered in here out of idle curiosity, but something really struck me about the whole CherryPal thing:
Supposedly their credit card processing capability went away -- it's unclear whether this termination was on their part, or on the part of their clearinghouse -- and never returned. I find this somewhat odd, because even when I was running a one-person, home-based software company, I was able to get CC processing services (they sent a guy to my physical location to take a picture of ... well ... my desk!) I find it rather surprising that a company which is somewhat more than one person and a desk has difficulty doing this.
Also, it has been mentioned that they are accepting checks and Western Union. Significantly, unlike credit cards, it's difficult to recover money that has been paid by check, and impossible to recover it from Western Union. No credit cards? No PayPal? Not even, given the controversy that has been going on for so long, an escrow service?
I've got no dog in this fight. I'm just a disinterested observer. And what I've observed does not cast the best light on the CherryPal people.
As far as the three random people showing up here sole to fiercely defend a corporation which may or may not be engaging in questionable business practices ... that's just odd. I own a netbook which I love mightily, and many other people are, um, considerably less enthusiastic about (including, unfortunately, its manufacturer). And as anyone who's been in a discussion with me here knows, I can get vociferous about my opinions. But I still don't go searching for random forums where someone might be criticizing the brand of netbook I own and joining them to defend it, and solely to defend it. That isn't the action of an enthusiast, and it
is the action of a shill.
There have been a lot of other things that similarly provoke suspicion: Hints of legal threats, just vague enough for plausible deniability. Referring to any non-adulatory opinion as "flaming". Demanding personal identity information from other posters. Comments that come down to "you're all so meeeeeeean!" Accusations of sexism. Techniques straight out of "The Art of Controversy". And one really, really big one: a lack of enthusiasm for the product, only for the company. None of these, either, are characteristic of an enthusiast, and they're very characteristic of a shill.
By way of comparison, I have a PRS-505. I love it. I collect classic series books (Tom Swift, etc.) and I now have a large library of them on my 505, instead of adding more of them (and their attendant mildew) to my shelves, which has also freed up my used/rare book buying budget for hard-to-find works on military history instead. I can flip open my PRS and read whatever I want, whenever I want. I'm not about to give up my dead trees books, but I wouldn't give up my PRS either. I don't even like being more than ten feet away from it! Even after a year of ownership, I can't stop talking about how much I love it to anyone who will hold still long enough. I think the world would be a better place if everyone disregarded all those lesser ebook devices and and demanded the One True Reader, the PRS-505.
Oh, and Sony? They suck.
