Wooters Consumer Blog - Ipod, Credit cards, Car Stereos, Cigars

For those of you who don’t know what Swoopo is don’t be alarmed it’s not a new move on the monkey bars, your friends don’t have a leg up on you there.  No, it’s a new auction site aimed at people with big bank rolls and champagne dreams.  It works like this…

The concept is easy enough, buy bids for the chance of getting an item for far less than retail.  Sounds good right??  Well yes and no.

You go to the site and register, you have to automatically fund your account with bids.  Bids cost $1 each and are used to purchase these “deals”.  They have different bid packages:

BidPack XXL - 750 Bids for $500.00

BidPack XL - 300 Bids for $200.00

BidPack L - 150 Bids for $100.00

BidPack M - 75 Bids for $50.00

BidPack S - 30 Bids for $20.00

Yes that’s right $500!! Wow are they nuts?  That’s a lot of money to try and win and I mean “win” because you are throwing money at products you have a very slim chance of winning.  I spent well over 2 hours on the site, put my $20 bucks up and started to try my luck.  This place is brutal, you have people going in every 10 seconds placing more and more bids on the same product trying to win.  Everytime they hit the bid button is $1, I would hate to think how many times they are pressing that button.

I tried to win 300 more bids, it is a 100% off auction meaning there will be close to 1000 bids before anybody wins it.  Hmm, 1000 bids = $1000 and they are offering a 300 bid $300 for it.  Good business model or crooked?  Maybe gambling?  Of course it’s gambling, you are waggering hundreds of dollars to try and get a product you may never see.  Of the 30 bids I bought I didn’t win one thing, and I was really trying.  I would stay away from this site as I would assume 10% of people who actually actively bid get their money back on wins.

Sprint and HTC just recently launched the new “touch Diamond” phone. I have had the phone for about a month now and the touch flow OS is really nice. It is very different from any other phone I have had in the past, the likes of the HTC wing, and HTC MDA, SDA are in the same ballpark but not the same concept. The phone is out to compete with the Iphone which gets so much attention that every time I hear about it I want to puke. Not to mention the Ipod is keeping just about every plastic and speaker manufacturer on the planet in business with companies making a docking station for it. Woot has a docking station on clearance every other day!

The phone itself is small, smaller than what I am used to but It has a nice weight and feel to it in the hand. It sports a 3.2 Megapixel camera complete with video capture as well….which is really nice. The camera does have a major flaw though, the person or landscape has to be completely still or the picture turns out really blurry… ugh!

The touch flow OS allows one finger navigation thoughout all of the programs… contacts, emails, pictures, etc.. It is very responsive as well, you don’t have to press your finger too hard against the phone to get a response. The phone currently uses the Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 which has some great features in itself. Using active sync is easy and flawless on this OS, I had the phone for no longer than 15 minutes and already had my email, contacts, and calendar synced up from my Outlook.

All in all I would recommend this phone to anyone that has a slightly computer literate mind and has enough money to buy one right now… they are not cheap. As this was written they are going for $400-$500 on ebay, or I’m sure Sprint would not mind trapping you in a 2 year contract to knock a few hundred bucks off the price.