Pioneer finally wants to listen!! Read this.

[alien2000a]

And if the Pioneer guy is not the right person to adress these at least you can get contact e-mails for us to send our comments. If European support is seperate could you also try to get where to contact (other than local pioneer service points of course since they cannot code updates to firmware naturally.)

 

Many thanks for taking this forward. We are all waiting to hear from you tomorrow.

 

Good luck to us all.

[alien2000a]

Dear mastrcht,

 

If it is not too late please have a look at my other post which involves critical information and can come useful for passing onto the pioneer reps.

 

http://avic411.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=136816#136816

[mastrch]

I JUST HAD THE MOST DISAPPOINTING DISCUSSION OF MY LIFE.

 

Clearly Pioneer has no intention of changing anything in it's device.

 

Two pioneer guys came over and they first tried to convince me everything was working fine, but that is was a matter of fine tuning and parameter adjustments.

 

OK for me, so I invited them - as experts - to configure and fine-tune my device. After 30 minutes, some critical questions from my side and a test drive, they admitted that there might be some inconsistencies in the design, but that they could not be described as bugs, but rather, inconsistencies in the design.

 

Bug or inconsistencies - what's in a name... ?-, my logical next question then was by when they planned to solve these. And I got an answer that is no answer; the development is done in Japan and they have no view whatsoever on what is going to be developped and by when it is going to be developped. Very poor internal communication if you ask me.

 

Wanna hear something REALLY funny? When I talked them about the keybeep issue and the fact that it could not be turned off, one of the reps started with some high tech talk about off factory programmed read only memory chips that cannot be changed even via the update procedure. Stopped him after a few sentences and told him that right now there already is a mod available on the internet for that. They guy look at me as if he were struck by lightning. "Oh", he said "I didn't know that. I definitely need to take that up with our programmers and technical guys"

 

Then I handed them over the list with bugs and problems that you informed me of. I got the following blunt answer; "Sorry sir, are you sure they all had the latest version of the firmware installed on their navigation systems and also the latest firmware on the devices they were using along with it?" Could impossibly say yes to that question without loosing my credibility. And as we had been arguing for over 2 hours yet, I didn't want to loose any more time - because that was definitely what it was.

 

So conclusion of today. The Pioneer reps were worthless - but it's not only them. I can't remember having been in contact with a competent Pioneer employee!! They don't know their own products, and as product managers, you should also know what forums your product is being discussed at.

 

Result. Pioneer has no intention at all of refunding me. (Refunding is not so common in Europe, especially not here in Belgium). The proposed me to install an Avic D3BT until the problems were solved. (no deadline however)

 

I seriously think of selling my F900BT on eBay or so. To bad I have all these additional accessories like CAN module, etc that I'm going to loose a lot of money on when selling.

 

Dear all, I thought Pioneer was going to listen, an illusion apparently, they just wanted to convince me I had to read the manual more carefully and that my complaints were due to me not using the device correctly. But the fact that they want to install the D3 for the time being, proves they know the F-series are not working correctly and they know the previous series was better. (Deja vu. Think about windows Vista and Windows XP)

 

NEVER AGAIN WILL I BUY ANOTHER PIONEER DEVICE

 

Not even a set of cheap car speakers...amen.

[mubbly]

I hate to ask but - did those reps give you any cool merch? Like pens or whatever? I love that stuff.

[alien2000a]

Wow,

 

That's terrible news then. This is no suprise to me since I've been battling with a bunch of other users for over a year to get Nokia update a certain model and fix the bugs. I can't stand companies who promise too much and cannot deliver even half of their promises. But we've got our consumers' rights. Let's find a contact detail in Japan then and make a solid approach to have our worries addressed. Companies now know better than that to avoid pissing off their customers and I still think pioneer is not a cheap company to oversee these problems. All we need to do is to find the right adress to have our voices heard.

 

Let's keep pushing and once again thank you for your efforts to take this even this far.

 

And as the last resort, we'll take every possible measure to support Leetcoder to write the whole thing for us since he does it much better than the Japan guys themselves.

[tacomaboy]

I caught flak here for it before for mentioning it. But if someone plans on starting a class action lawsuit, I would jump on it in a heartbeat. I want my money back so badly.

[mastrch]

Any other people from Belgium willing to start a law suit with me? I know what proedure to follow and - unless you have a better contact - know what lawyer to contact for this kind of cases.

 

Starting the law suit alone is of no use, as it would cost at least 300-400 Eur, which is approximately what I'd loose selling it second hand.

 

However, if the cost can be split over 2, 3 or maybe more cases...

 

Let me know!!

 

PS mubbly, no Pioneer merchandising. Not even a pen...

[mubbly]

I can't understand why someone would want to sue a company over a product that is less than one year old! Over such trivial annoyances, too!

[mastrch]

We have to sue them to give them a strong signal that selling devices that are still stuffed with bugs is just not done. It should serve as an example to avoid future product launches maybe with even more bugs.

 

I remeber a time, not so long ago, when new devices were release at a slower pave, where new devices worked well when they were brought out. People didn't have to care too much about firmware updates, at least not for major issues. Then we had Microsoft bringing our fault products with loads of patches and updates afterwards. And now more and more manufacturs start doing this.

 

Mubbly, I do respect your opinion of course, But do we really want all new products to be brought out when they still have (too) many bugs and than have to rely on the manufacturer's goodwill to solve the problems? If we let this happen, then we give manufacturers the message that the way they are working today is perfectly fine, and we all are extremely patient users that don't mind even major bugs. And worse, one never knows what bugs a manufacturer is going to solve and which he is not going to solve. In other words, you never know how many bugs are going to remain unsolved.

 

Honestly, me, myself, I want to be just on the leading edge rather then on the bleeding edge when it come to new product adoption. I prefer to wait until the moment where manufacturers have sufficiently debugged their devices so that they work more or less without any major issues. For marketing reasons, they are never going to tell us a products is still too new and still contains bugs. A navigation system is too expensive to take that risk.

 

Yes, the avic F-series is a device with a huge potential, but today we don't see too much of that, only a lot of frustrated users.

 

I could write 10 more pages why it would make sense to sue them. Pioneer is not going to go bankrupt because the have to refund a bunch of customers, but the hassle will - I hope at least - make them think twice before bringing out new buggy products.

 

P.S. From what I have heard today, I wouldn't expect to much changes from Pioneer as to everything that is not really a bug. Especially, forget about whishlists, that I can tell you now already. Because those are not even going to be looked at. (Little or no added value compared to the cost.)

 

The choice is up to us, users.

[tacomaboy]

I can't understand why someone would want to sue a company over a product that is less than one year old! Over such trivial annoyances, too!

 

For 1000 bucks, the trivial problems are not so trivial. Every time the system locks up for a 60 seconds after I hang up makes me want to punch the screen out.

 

I expect more for my 1000 bucks, and I expect more from Pioneer. They don't seem to really want to listen to our complaints, they throw us a small bone occasionally, but the system is really subpar. Not what I expected, and certainly not as snappy and clean as the videos I saw on Pioneers website before I bought it.

[cranbers]

I would say if they weren't making an effort to fix issues, like they did with the firmware updates already released and they said there were no issues, but the unit acted like it did with the 1.0 firmware, and there was no return policy or effort to fix the units, then sure i'd say sue them.

 

But the fact is, you can sell the unit, you could of returned it from your point of purchase, or even contacted pioneer directly and im sure they would of made arrangments to fix the issue, in some manner.

 

I personally have no issues with the unit now, and im using all the fancy stuff, iphone 3g, blueooth, voice recognition, no hangs, no crashes. My only remaining issue which seems to already be mentioned in the EU update is the quiet mic on bluetooth calls.

 

So, what do you expect from a lawsuit? Your money back? A new firmware update? Money for lost time? a fixed unit via ship out repair?

 

This is what people are talking about regarding sue happy, the only ones who do benefit in this world in that regard in the end is the lawyers, on both sides. You me, big companies are the ones out the money.

 

Pioneer is trying, in regards to them having a lack of communication between employees, and divisions, hell yeah. They have some serious issues with training.

 

Also in regards to your reps being clueless, didn't we all get that impression if anyone has called their help desk? I have a feeling they are given a brochure, and a way to defelct issues to get you off the phone asap, and thats about it.

 

Reps call center or otherwise, are not given informaiton or a heads up on whats going on. Those are internal things, like they said happen in Japan, so just because their pay check says pioneer, doesn't mean they are told anything more then we are. So an update taht fixes whatever issues are left could be out next, week stopping this discussion in its tracks, but that right there is thier number one problem. Not communicating with the customers. They shoudl start an avic engineer blog, saying we know issues are there, were working on them. Things are going great on a new patch, please be patient.

 

But obviously that is not going to happen. So I would say get rid of the thing, you can sell it on ebay for a descent price or even on amazon. Or ask for a depot repair, or suck it up.

[alien2000a]

Well I fully support mastrcht on this case and although I'm not in Belgium I will provide any efforts both financially and personally.

 

His analysis is quite right. If you look at Nokia for discussions forum for example you'll see hundreds of mobile phone users struggling to get debugged phones after many months although paying hundreds of euros. More and more companies are putting their products to the market before they are fully de-bugged and we're being seen as paying beta testers for products.

 

On the other hand the following issues need to be officially unswered by Pioneer in my opinion:

 

1- Since teleatlas is acquired by Tomtom who will provide map updates to AVIC's I-Go

 

2- Nav n go who produces I-go has dropped support for 8.00 and will only provide maps for version 8.3.1 onwards which the maps are not useable in our version. What will happen now if Pioneer does not bring a new update with 8.3.1 on? Will we carry on using old maps from 2007 for ever as we are doing now? (Or will they come out with a G900BT model which is running 8.3.1 and make us feel like idiots for buying our F series?)

 

3- If the press bulletins of F Series launch were promising "daily updates" aren't they playing against the law by not updating our maps since 2007? Isn't it a mistreatment of consumer rights?

 

4- Why is the voice recognition option is disabled by the code where the same hardware and even the whole software lies within the European versions?

 

Lawsuit or not. Big heads in Japan needs to be made aware of these serious problems and the only way is to get a right amount of headcount from this forum.

 

I suggest starting a thread or sticky for this to sign users up and we can start to think of which steps we'll take next.

[cjean]

Totally agree with above

 

+1

 

Charles

[VBLUE42]

I personally would love to see a lawsuit and would support it. You sue companies when it appears that they wont listen and dont care. Pioneer is this in every manner. And I wouldn't expect any more updates from this point either. The fact is, if they deem the unit useful then they will stop development on updates. Minor annoyances will not matter to them if it does not stop you from using the unit. I say this because I have worked for a company in the past that had exactly the same problem as Pioneer does now. However once the major problems were fixed development stopped on the unit because they considered the unit useful and no need for further development. This was a company that was the industry standard in their field until they released the affected product. Unfortunately however a lawsuit is probably just not practical. What is however is to spread the word out to the electronic media websites. All of the web sites that review products like this need to be made aware of the problem and report it. That is where you will hurt Pioneer, negative media attention.

[cranbers]

Well I fully support mastrcht on this case and although I'm not in Belgium I will provide any efforts both financially and personally.

 

His analysis is quite right. If you look at Nokia for discussions forum for example you'll see hundreds of mobile phone users struggling to get debugged phones after many months although paying hundreds of euros. More and more companies are putting their products to the market before they are fully de-bugged and we're being seen as paying beta testers for products.

 

On the other hand the following issues need to be officially unswered by Pioneer in my opinion:

 

1- Since teleatlas is acquired by Tomtom who will provide map updates to AVIC's I-Go

 

2- Nav n go who produces I-go has dropped support for 8.00 and will only provide maps for version 8.3.1 onwards which the maps are not useable in our version. What will happen now if Pioneer does not bring a new update with 8.3.1 on? Will we carry on using old maps from 2007 for ever as we are doing now? (Or will they come out with a G900BT model which is running 8.3.1 and make us feel like idiots for buying our F series?)

 

3- If the press bulletins of F Series launch were promising "daily updates" aren't they playing against the law by not updating our maps since 2007? Isn't it a mistreatment of consumer rights?

 

4- Why is the voice recognition option is disabled by the code where the same hardware and even the whole software lies within the European versions?

 

Lawsuit or not. Big heads in Japan needs to be made aware of these serious problems and the only way is to get a right amount of headcount from this forum.

 

I suggest starting a thread or sticky for this to sign users up and we can start to think of which steps we'll take next.

 

This unit has already been completely blasted by all sites, forums and stores that sell or support car stereo's, gps systems etc. Look up the review on amazon, crutchfield, newegg etc. All have very negative bad reviews, especially prior to the 2.0 update. But most people are very happy after the update. At least the bugs that remain aren't show stoppers.

 

I think a lot of the issues people have are often times user error, we see it numerous times here in the forum, and 99 percent are thanks to people not reading the god damn manual.

 

I heard a story that struck me as damn maybe their right, and that is asian countries with davanced electronics don't want to sell here, simply because american's dont' read the manual, and instead bombard tech support and returns. Especially with advanced electronics, like smart phones.

 

Anyway point is, what issues are you guys talking about? Are there bugs left, I am sure there are, but to say its worthy of a lawsuit, I think your all going a bit too far. It will be a waste of time, money, energy, and I think Pioneer is getting all the negative attention they deserve.

 

This is a niche product, they dont' sell tires, food, or an operating system. they sell a 1000 dollar stereo system at msrp, and at most have sold maybe a few 10's of thousands. Not millions or 10's or 100's of millions.

 

I hope they will communicate better with customers, educate their support staff, and continue updating the unit. But I am very happy with my unit now, its' stable, it responds fairly well now, bluetooth works without issues, voice recognition does as well, and navigation is probably the buggiest area, but pioneer does not build that software, no doubt its contracted out, and I am sure they wil be using someone else in the future.

 

When you build a frankenstein product like this, from multiple different vendors, then slap your name on it, and those other companies build a proprietary type of product for you, based on their commercial product, no doubt its going to suck, be buggy and be outdated.

 

So that's their fault, best thing we an do is not buy, complain like were doing, and perhaps f series 2 will fix all these issues and complaints by going with third partieis, that werent the lowest bidder.