If you thought that Best Buy selling the Droid 2 Global for $100, or the Droid Pro for $50, was a crazy-mad bargain, it seems that you weren’t the only one.
Engadget are reporting that Best Buy have issued a “stop sale” on the two handsets, and are officially dubbing it a recall. It’s so serious, in fact, that it seems Verizon are no longer activating any phones bought at Best Buy.
But, with no serious issues known on the handsets, why would they do such a thing?
Jump through the break for the full, sordid tale. → Read More
If you like white as much as you like large phones, then you’ll be chuffed to know that Best Buy now (exclusively) have the Dell Streak available in white.
Well, kind of… It’s not all white: it’s white-backed, giving it a two-tone look reminiscent of 1920s gangster footwear. → Read More
Best Buy wants your business this holiday season. They want your business so bad that they will cover the cost of shipping on most of the items they sell. CDs, DVDs, AV equipment — the vast majority of the online store now ships for free. Of course in-store pickup is still available at no charge as well with the free shipping offer valid through December 21. Note, free shipping does not apply to notebooks, netbooks, iPads, iPods, game hardware, Dynex TVs, appliances, and “some other items.” The fun question here is whether Walmart forced Best Buy into this free shipping game. → Read More
Facial recognition technology companies have been in the limelight lately, with Apple buying Polar Rose for a rumored $29 million and rival Face.com raising $4.3 million from Russian search juggernaut Yandex and others.
A lesser-known but equally impressive startup in said field, Viewdle, announces today that it has secured $10 million in Series B funding from a group of noteworthy investors that includes Best Buy, BlackBerry Partners Fund and Qualcomm. → Read More
If you want that BlackBerry tablet, the PlayBook, your best bet may be to visit a Best Buy near you. Best Buy’s chief executive said that when the device hits the market (hopefully before the end of the year), “we’ll be happy to offer it to our customers.” → Read More
On the surface, Tecca looks like a pretty cool service. You download an app, browse it for devices you’re looking at in store, and figure out if the price is right. How? By checking out online prices, most notably the prices available from Best Buy, one of the investors in Fuse Capital, creator of Tecca. Even if the app brings up 50 other prices from 50 other stores, the assumption here is that BB has the best price and you go home happy.
Best Buy is already in the cat bird seat when it comes to electronics purchases. Companies that support “lowest price” challenges (we visit P.C. Richards in New York for appliances, for example) are beholden to their low prices and although they’re often draconian when it comes to checking your wallet on the way out the door. But they’re the only game in town and services like Tecca, even if they don’t immediately bring up Best Buy pricing, is an effort to solidify that concept before any upstarts come into the market. → Read More
I just walked into Best Buy and what do I see? A stack of Canon 60Ds ready to be grabbed. The lady working said that they just came in; when she looked on their internal website it showed full availability and no holds. If you’ve been waiting for the new 18.0 megapixel camera with the Vari-Angle LCD and superb video quality then now is your chance–you can grab this new SLR with an 18-135mm lens for only $1399. → Read More
All day, the Internet has been erupting with news that the age of notebook and netbooks is over, and the age of tablets — specifically, the iPad, of course — has begun. One of the main catalysts of this eruption was Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn who supposedly told the Wall Street Journal that the iPad is cannibalizing laptop sales, especially netbook sales. Or did he?
Here’s the blurb from the WSJ story this morning:
Mr. Dunn also said internal estimates showed that the iPad had cannibalized sales from laptop PCs, especially netbooks, by as much as 50%.
Now, that’s obviously not a direct quote, but it is a very clear statement directly attributed to him. And it’s a huge statement as Best Buy is the nation’s leading consumer electronics giant. It’s basically saying that not only is the iPad winning, it is ushering in a new era of computing. In other words, Microsoft and all the PC incumbents are screwed. → Read More
If you’re one of the unlucky few whose local Best Buy was not one of those selected to sell iPads, weep no more. Starting September 26th, Best Buy will have iPads at every one of its 1093 stores, though it’s unclear whether they will have a whole special Apple section like many other stores do. Go get ‘em, tiger. But skip the extended warranty, you’re probably going to buy the iPad 2 within like six months. → Read More
Get thee to the Best Buyery! Best Buy is offering pre-orders of the G2 for $199 with two year contract. The phone will ship on October 2. → Read More
Crossing the wires now—the Amazon Kindle will be available in Best Buy stores sometime this autumn. This probably makes sense for a few reasons. → Read More
Look out GameStop, there’s a new gun in town. And it’s got the brick and mortar location, name recognition, and marketing power to give you a run for your money. Ol’ blue and yellow is moving into the used game market starting this week and I think some competition will only be a good thing. → Read More
Remember when netbooks where the next big thing? Best Buy was definitely pushing them, I remember last holiday season you couldn’t walk into your local store without being assailed by cheap, low powered computers. Well get ready, Best Buy has decided that tablet computing will be the next big thing. → Read More
Best Buy is rolling out an in-store mobile couponing system in conjunction with a startup called shopkick. The system will be in place in 187 stores by tomorrow and 257 stores by October 1.
Earlier this month, we got a preview of how the system works (see video below). Instead of checking in, as you would with a geo app like Foursquare or Gowalla, shopkick automatically recognizes when someone with the shopkick app on their phone walks into a store. → Read More
Well, look at that. A Rocketfish tablet. Can’t say we saw this coming, but Best Buy’s CTO and Geek Squad founder, Robert Stephens, just tweeted two pics of the surprisingly polished-looking tablet. We’re currently digging for more details but from what we can tell from the pics, the tablet looks remarkable similar to early HP Slate pics. Every seem and port seems to be the same right down to the (docking?) port on the bottom. Even if it’s not built on the same platform, the screen sizes look about the same, placing the Rocketfish tablet in the 9-inch range. → Read More
Oh, Best Buy. When will you stop pimping your Geek Squad brand? It was once a beloved tech service, but then you bought it and started looking for the most ridiculous tasks to make a quick buck — like setting up an ebook reader or creating an OS X user account. → Read More
Earlier, we wrote about shopkick, a company with a different take on the whole check-in revolution as it relates to retail. But it’s one thing to read about it, it’s another to see it. That’s exactly why shopkick invited several members of the press to a Best Buy in San Francisco this morning to see the app in action.
As you can see in the full 15-minute walk-through video below, the execution is impressive. The minute you enter a Best Buy location, your phone recognizes it and you get points and a message that there are deals available at this location. You can also use it to scan items and get more points and other potential deals. → Read More
Yesterday, we wrote about Future Checkin, a third-party app that uses Foursquare’s API to check you in to a location without you having to actually hit any buttons to check-in. In fact, you can keep your phone in your pocket and it will work. Today, shopkick is teaming up with Best Buys around the U.S. to offer something similar. But with an important twist: without doing anything, you are rewarded for walking into retail stores. And you can’t fake a check-in with their method.
“This is the intersection of the mobile and the physical world,” shopkick co-founder Cyriac Roeding says. “You turn an offline store into an interactive experience,” he continues.
All of this works by way of a mobile application. The app is able to tell when you walk into a store (Best Buy, in this case) — and where you are in the store (that’s the future plan anyway, but shopkick demoed it today). But the key is that the user is in the store — not in the parking lot or simply close by. This works because “shopkick Signal” technology is installed in the retail stores. This isn’t about GPS. → Read More
Conventional wisdom says that it’d be a better idea to build a ladder to the moon than it would be to start a magazine in 2010. Apparently Best Buy disagrees. The retailer announced, some months back, that it would be starting a new video game magazine called @Gamer. (Pronounced “gamer”—ignore the @.) It hooked up with the good folks at Future, the same people who publish the World of Warcraft magazine, as well as Edge, PC Gamer, and Nintendo Power, to produce it. → Read More
