David Pogue writes whatever you tell him to
David Pogue of the New York Times wrote a humiliating column today correcting a huge pricing error in his last piece. He wrote about cellphone startup Cubic Telecom, which carries international phone calls over the Internet to give really cheap rates. Pogue listed off a bunch of rates to places like Greece or Iraq and excitedly wrote that "the appropriate world traveler's response ought to be involuntary drooling." Except the prices he quoted were just plain wrong. That'll stop up your salivary glands.
Ordinarily, I conduct my own tests of products and write my own conclusions. But on a product whose primary feature is its price, I have to rely on the company that makes it — especially when I'm writing the review before the product is available to the public, as often happens in my business.
So Pogue wrote what the company told him to. This is the trouble with exclusives. Pogue wrote a glowing review, ahead of the product's launch, and then looked like a fool when the company's website — which Pogue hadn't seen, since it was scheduled to launch the same day as his exclusive review came out — posted very different prices than were in print.
In his correction, Pogue says that the prices are still much lower than using, say, your AT&T cell-phone service overseas, so Cubic is still a good deal. Um, no thanks — I'll stay far away from a company that flat-out lies to a reviewer, especially one as well known as David Pogue. Still, I give Pogue credit for coming clean and apologizing rather than just sticking a correction on some back page somewhere.
I'm not exactly sure how the problem could have been avoided — in 20 years of reviewing tech products, nobody has ever deliberately misled me on hard facts like prices — but I thought you should hear about it from me.
