Fake reviews are easy to generate and often difficult to detect. There are Facebook groups offering money to turn out five-star reviews.
A reporter from the website TheHustle.co wrote about a Chinese merchant who offered him a refund of his purchase price plus $10 to write a favorable review of an iPhone charger. It already had 3,971 five-star reviews and was labeled "Amazon's Choice."
"Isn't this illegal?" he asked. "No. You will love," was the merchant's reply.
The problem got worse in 2015 when Amazon started wooing Chinese vendors. The number of products sold went up by as much as a third, and thousands of new vendors appeared. Based in manufacturing hubs like Guangzhou and Shenzhen, they ship directly to Amazon's warehouses.
If in doubt of a review's veracity, go to Fakespot.com and paste in the Web address of the product. We looked up the current Amazon's Choice for iPhone chargers and pasted in the Amazon page link for the AmazonBasics Nylon Braided Certified iPhone Charger, with 13,856 ratings. Fakespot says only 35 percent of the ratings are reliable, even though Amazon already removed or modified around 1,491 of them. We tested a knee brace, and Fakespot said 61 percent of the 373 ratings were reliable.
If you don't want to deal with Amazon, there are alternatives: eBay, Overstock, Newegg, AliExpress and Walmart's Jet. AliExpress, owned by Alibaba, had a knee brace for $2.85 that looked similar to the one we just bought on Amazon for $18. But it comes from China with free shipping, so it wouldn't arrive for almost a month. We found a car phone-holder in the 1-cent product category.
We are regular customers of Amazon. We like the goods and the service, but we're leery of any product that has thousands of high-ranking reviews.
GADGET TIME
Joy loves swimming. Now with augmented-reality goggles, she can see how far and how fast she's going by reading the yellow text displayed on the one of the lenses. The display can be switched to appear over the left or right eye.
The $200 Form Swim goggles have a light, fingernail-sized computer. They look like regular goggles, except for a reflective surface. (Bob said Joy looked like the robot in the movie The Terminator.) Your swim statistics are saved in a free app and you decide which ones you want to see while you swim.
The first time you get in the pool, a tutorial switches on, telling you which of two buttons to push. Joy chose "lap swim" over "intervals," and it worked perfectly. On the next swim, she got lost in the settings, accidentally switching the read-out to her left eye so it was upside down. So she turned it off and started over. On the third day, she definitely had the hang of it. On her best day, she went 1.585 miles in an hour and was continually moving except for 10 seconds, burning 408 calories. Good to know.
TRADE SHOW
CNET.com told us about the biggest trade show in Europe, which showcased a lot of gadgets.
The AirDresser by Samsung is a free-standing closet that steams your clothes to remove wrinkles. It will probably cost around $2,000, the price of LG Corp.'s Styler, which is similar and already available.
Captain America and Captain Marvel designs are on $400 smart watches from Garmin, available in October. Called the Legacy Hero Series, they're discreet. The standard displays are not obviously comic-inspired, and the heroes' movie mottos -- Captain America's "I can do this all day" and Captain Marvel's "Higher, further, faster" -- are engraved on the backs. The Captain America watch has eight days of battery life; Captain Marvel has seven. Use either one to play music from Spotify, Amazon Music or Deezer. Wave it at a cash register to pay a bill, or monitor your workouts. Now that's a super hero!
These gadgets and more are covered in a CNET article, "The Best New Tech from IFA 2019."
UP IN THE AIR
FlightRadar24.com will tell you, and show you, how many planes are in the sky at any given moment. On the day we checked in, there were 11,593 flights in the air worldwide.
Ever wonder how many people are in space right now? According to HowManyPeopleAreInSpaceRightNow.com there are three Americans, two Russians and one Italian. Click on a name to get their information. For instance, Christina Koch from Grand Rapids, Mich., has been in space for more than 27 weeks. By now, she must be feeling like a floating decimal point. She arrived at the International Space Station with Nick Hague from Belleville, Kan.
SMART-SPEAKER POETRY
Alexa, the voice inside the Echo or Echo Dot smart speakers, now reads poems. She reads them too fast, in somewhat of a monotone, but they're better than nothing.
We said: "Read a poem by Emily Dickinson," and she did. We said "Read a poem by Robert Frost," and she did. But when we said "Read a poem by Robert W. Service," she said: "Here's a poem by Robert W. Service, 'Ballad of a Bohemian.'" It sounded good, but she didn't read it. Oh well, we found it on YouTube.
Bob and Joy Schwabach can be reached by email at bobschwab@gmail.com and joy.schwabach@gmail.com.
Business on 09/21/2019