Liquipel, will it void my warranty?

The technology in question at the moment is the Liquipel treatment of your phone or other technical device. Having a great interest in the process, and other such technologies, I have been searching the internet to find the answer to this question.

There have been verbal claims in various videos that it does not affect your warranty. The main reason behind this: the way the ‘Liquipel’ treatment works is by placing a nano-particle coating outside and inside the gadget. This coating cannot be seen, and cannot be felt, hence cannot be detected. As a result, unless you tell your phone company or vendor about the change you made, they have no way of knowing whether you have had the treatment or not.

I was on a mission to get a more definitive answer.

If you ask anybody who is in touch with Liquipel, they say that they will not make a claim to state yay or nay. They will just tell you that, yes, it will not affect your device, its performance, or its touch and feel in any way. So theoretically, it should not void the warranty.

The claim itself is sensible. However, one way to check this could be to check if the Water Detector Stickers still respond to water or not. If they do, then there is no treatment. If they don’t, it means that the phone has been coated in a liquid repellent technology. However, I don’t believe many phone companies or vendors will actually be bothered to place this test as a part of their regular warranty tests.

Next step was to check with phone companies and vendors. So I asked around. I sent emails and tweets to all the companies that were approachable. This included both manufacturers as well as different service providers in the UK.

Sadly, once again I did not get an answer. Almost everyone gave me the same answer:  they can only check once the device is given to them. Of course, the only way to check this could be to get your device treated, and then hope that somehow a problem occurs to your device, within the warranty period, which does not have to do anything with liquid damage. While not impossible, this could be a very hard test to perform. The problem has to be unrelated with liquid damage because it will not be a fair test if it was. (If the phone failed because of liquid damage, Liquipel fails, and if it doesn’t, there is no warranty claim!)

As can be seen, the replies I got were vague, and did not really tell me anything!

The same question seems to appear on forums a lot as well. Everyone has their own opinion about it, and it seems to come down to the fact that when treated, the technology is undetectable, so it should not affect the warranty.

So to summarize, sadly this question still goes unanswered. While the technology is great, I think the simple fact is that many of the companies making and selling phones, especially in the UK, are either unaware of this technology, or do not want to promise anything. Either way, it is annoying as a consumer not to get answers. Hopefully, as time goes on, more companies will become aware of this and form a policy about it. Till then, we have to wait. 

Nissan Leaf: The Turn On

Help me win a Nissan Leaf and promote Electric cars! Click please!

Adsense Ad Review Centre

If you use Adsense on your blog, you most probably do not agree with the kind of ads it puts up on your blog/website. If that is a problem, Adsense does give you an option to pick and choose between the kind of ads that show on your blog.

On the Adsense dashboard, click on the ‘Allow and Block Ads’. Within that, click on the Ad Review Centre. There is a chance it may not be enabled, but just clicking on the option enables it to you.

Once enabled, you should see on the left a list of Blocking Options. This gives you the options to block out various categories.

The most useful among this I found was ‘Sensitive Categories’. Clicking on this you will find the ability to block ads such as Dating websites, Pills, Get Rich quick schemes, and other such stuff you may normally class as spam. I have ended up blocking them all.

There are the General Categories which let you allow fine tune your ads.

There are the Ad Networks, which means if you know of particular ad networks that you do not approve, you can block them too.

In Advanced Settings you can allow ads to be based on visitors’ site visits, 3rd party preferences, as well as social media integration.

There are other settings, which means it allows you to review ads before they are shown etc, but I reckon unless you have loads of time, you won’t be able to go through them.

There is more help available of course, from Adsense, here: http://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&ctx=widg&answer=82503.

Give this a go, and tell me if your ads, and the resulting revenue increases.

Wishlist!

Well apparently Google allows Affiliate ads, so I am just writing down an experimental post here, to see if it achieves anything.
To help me along the way, I will post a wishlist of sorts... Of course you can feel free to buy me any of these items.

- Nikon D7000
- HTC One X
- Asus Transformer Prime
- Asus Padphone
- Samsung Galaxy Note
- A box set of Roald Dahl books
- A new wallet could work very well actually.
- Could do with a new laptop too...
- Some new wacky T-shirts
- A wireless keyboard / mouse set
- A portable HDD
- Some Arduino boards
- A sexy soldering iron
- Box set of electronic components

Well, here we see then, does this work?

Waterproof v Watersafe!

Sometime back I mentioned a service called ‘Liquipel’ that were promising to coat your device with a new technology that makes your electronic device ‘water-proof’. As I have already mentioned, this was a big claim, and many tech gurus tested this claim.

Some more footage has appeared in the popular show by Leo Laporte (https://plus.google.com/u/0/101261243957067319422/about) called LOL (Life of Leo, http://leoville.com/).  Here is a link to the video which shows them discussing Liquipel among other things:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGzxedgfiac&feature=youtu.be&t=27m

(This should jump straight to the 27^th minute. The feature goes on till about 32.31m and then the phone is mentioned again at 1:13:30).

It should be noted that the advice note that came with the phone did suggest that you do not submerge the phone in water, and if it gets wet, do not turn it on for at least 5 hours and do not charge it for at least 24 hours, all the regular behaviour you would expect around a normal electronic device which has not had any of this treatment.

Here is a further video with Leo discussing the issue with an engineer who is trying to fix his water-damaged iPhone:

http://socialcam.com/v/DJyWHO08?autostart=true&fs=twitter&fsk=hg3Yr8Jr

Followed by:

http://leoville.com/still-operating

Leo also talked about this on his twitter account ( https://twitter.com/#!/leolaporte):

Apparently, this is what he says about the response from Liquipel:

Anyway, Liquipel have now gone from saying it is waterproof to ‘watersafe’, probably a word they have coined to indicate it is water repellent, and not water proof. Problem being that the term watersafe is another vague term, and is open to interpretation.

As you can see:

Has now turned to:

On their website.

The main point of this article is obviously not to slag off a technology or a product or this very exciting service. I think what is important is that as consumers we understand the limitations of the products and services we buy, and do not try to abuse them. Most of us wear water-resistant watches but we hardly ever leave them submerged in water. The main theme is to make people aware of this technology, and its limitations.

This would mean that not only would we be able to look at this in a positive light, we would also be able to gain more confidence, and hopefully get the technology companies to take notice.

Crowd Funding

I wrote an article for Oxford Art Cat (www.oxfordartcat.com) on the topic of Crowd Funding.
It can be found at: http://www.oxfordartcat.com/2012/04/crowd-funding.html.
Do visit it, and leave comments if you have any. Also visit Oxford Art Cat for other Oxford and Art related articles. 

htc ONE = TECHNO

Like most Fandroids, I am either anticipating getting one of the HTC ONE devices, or have already got one. I belong to the former, where hopefully I will get a HTC ONE X next month.
So as I was daydreaming about my future phone this morning, I realized that the HTC ONE had a clever anagram, the word 'TECHNO'.

Being a fan of shows such as Doctor Who and X Files, I am all for anagrams. The main question is, is this deliberate or just a lucky coincidence. Don't think this humble little blog will be able to attract the attention of any of the HTC folk. Either way, I like! 

Dream diary

Another train journey, another dream diary.
This dream of mine had a very Stephen King ' The Cell' feel to it. We were in this park called 'South Park' in Oxford, and the beauty of this park is that it is on the slope of a hill, from where you can see all the beautiful sites of central Oxford and its inspiring spires.
So all of a sudden everyone stands up, points towards the spires and starts walking towards them uttering a unified 'ooo' sound.
As weird as it sounds on recalling it, this act seemed to be the most natural thing to do, and I kept wondering why we hadn't done this before.
While this act continued, as a reward for our faith perhaps, this glassy sphere appeared. While I don't remember anything special about it, I remember all of us being very excited about it.
And there it was, that is all I remember, though it still seems to be stuck in my head since a week or so.

Programming, for writers

Us programmers often say that we write code. Code is also expressed in terms of number of lines written.
However, it was when I was talking to a writer friend of mine the other day that I had the chance to explore the many parallels between writing and programming.
Here are a few of the similarities as I observed:

• Both text and code are written.
• Writing means you have to follow a set of rules called grammar, programming means you have to follow a set of rules called syntax. Interestingly, syntax does tell you where you need your commas and brackets and full stops and the like. 
• When writing, you are God in the universe you create. You are restricted by your genre, but that is about it. Anything can happen as long as you ate willing to write it within the confines of your genre. It is similar in programming, with the the program being restricted by the hardware it has to run on, and the language it is written in.
• Writers have plots and subplots, we have classes and methods.
• Writers have characters, we have constants and variables.
• The length of the text and the code both normally define how complex it is.
• There are word processors, and there are code processors, but both can be written on a notepad, and the program MS Notepad.
• One requires an editor, the other a compiler.
• Lastly, they are both immensely fun to do. :)

Feel free to add some of your own.
Ps, wrote this on my train in to work, so this classifies as the first of such blog posts.

Waterproof? Water Resistant!

In a recent post (http://www.smacula.co.uk/2012/02/perils-of-liquid-damage-and-solution.html)
I introduced you to an upcoming technology that helps prevent your electronic devices from
getting damaged from accidental liquid damage. The process involves coating the internals as
well as externals of the device with a molecular level protective layer, using nanotechnology,
which means that the water does not damage the phone, camera, tablet or other such device. It
floats off just like mercury off of a surface.


Obviously, there are a few companies out there offering a similar technology but promoting it
as waterproof. One such company is Liquipel (http://www.liquipel.com/), based in Southern
California. You send your device to them, and they treat it and send it back to you. After the
process, they claim, your phone/device is protected by a ‘waterproof’ shield. So much so that
this even protects the wet/liquid damage detector from getting wet in your device, which means
that even if the device was damaged, there would be no indication of water/liquid damage to the
device, and the warranty would still hold.

Snapshot from the Liquipel website

There are a few demonstration videos on their website, and clicking on this link easily walks you through them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jedv15ov3sw&list=UUfcQmhBVk8c_89icfy3O-aw&index=4&feature=plcp

And here is another video, where a live demonstration is shown. Their representative calls it waterproof as well as gives a live demo. Also claiming that the warranty cannot be void:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17ZdgGpAJWU&feature=youtu.be

Being excited about the whole technology, I delved further into it. One of my main curiosities revolved around the ‘waterproof’ claim. Not many devices are brave enough to use that statement. Even watches that are guaranteed to work at a depth of 100m, and can be used for deep sea diving do not use that statement. Interestingly enough, I was not the only one who was concerned. Steve from Fox had already put the claim to test, and produced this video. It all goes seemingly well right till the phone fails.
http://www.myfoxdfw.com/dpp/news/fox_4_features/deal_or_dud/deal-or-dud%3A-liquipel-022912

And this is where as a consumer, we have to be very careful. This technology is a beautiful and wonderful technology, and it serves its purpose quite well. However, it is not waterproof. Water resistant, yes, but not waterproof. Also, Liquipel do make a point, even though not as prominently, that this is just a preventive measure, and devices that are treated should not be submerged in water, taken swimming or surfing, and such like. They also politely ask you not to repeat the demonstrations they have done on the website. What would be useful is if they were a bit more clear about these things, as I can imagine this can get them into a lot of mess from various sources.


Lastly though, I still think that despite the misunderstandings I have portrayed in this article, there is still a lot of potential and use from this upcoming technology, and it could hopefully revolutionize our device care issues in the future.