Hacker News Reader

Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

Do you have attend to get the freebie? I can't imagine spending the money AND the time to get a freebie of their choice, when I can buy something of my choice w/o having to leave my house.

View on HN

The freebies substantially reduce the effective cost, possibly to $0 or less. Last year everybody got a free Droid and EVO, which you could have flipped on Craigslist for at least $600. If you're in the SF area and have any interest in the conference, it's a no-brainer.

Agreed. I presume the main point of charging at all is to match supply & demand, but given that everyone believes the price is <= 0 anyway, this obviously isn't working any more.

I guess if you're in SF that may make sense. Being in WA I wouldn't fly down for a couple of days even if the price was free. Just wouldn't be worth the time for a cell phone or tablet.

UPDATE: Although after rereading what I wrote, I realized that those people whose time means so little that they'd attend a conference largely to get the cellphone/tablet are exactly the people you don't want at the conference.

And a google TV a couple of months latter

Several co-workers and myself are road tripping it from Oregon and splitting hotel rooms. We're all self funding to go. I can't speak for the others but I'm interested in the sessions, though without potential freebies it would have been a much harder decision.

I believe this year you will have to attend. Last year they sent the Droid or (Nexus One outside the U.S.) prior to the conference, there is nothing auguring to this early giveaway this year.

I'm attending this year again and I'm flying from Canada. No way I would attend just for the freebies. The plane is currently at close to 800$ and my hotel will be probably at least 600$. If I wanted a phone, I would buy one, it's much cheaper. And I would not miss 3-4 days of work. I love the freebies, but they would be awfully expensive if the conference had no intrinsic value for me.

I didn't see a reason why they sent them early last year anyways.

Because 2 years ago everyone was registering there HTC ion with the 1 month prepaid sims they gave. Anyway that's the reason they gave.

The email they sent announcing the early giveaway suggested they wanted people to be able to get their feet wet with the SDK on a modern Android device and maybe show off your prototype apps with people over lunch or beers at the after hours party.

It worked well for me; a friend of mine and I spent a couple Saturdays at a coffee shop ahead of the conference tinkering with the Android SDK to learn how things worked. I already had an N1, but he didn't, and so now we could actually hack together on stuff. After messing with things ahead of time I got a lot more value out of the sessions and was able to hit the ground running when I got home.

Doing so again will depend on whether they feel the need to seed the developer community with another new device. Do they really need to do this for tablets?

Six months ago, I would have guessed a Google TV give-away, but this year's agenda is pretty light on Google TV.

Six months ago, I would have guessed a Google TV give-away, but this year's agenda is pretty light on Google TV.

Actually, back in December they sent Google TV devices out to I/O 2010 attendees (or at least some; I received a Logitech Revue and so did a coworker of mine who attended). They did not promise this at I/O and an email just came out of the blue around Thanksgiving asking for my shipping address. So far I am disappointed with Google TV but I'm looking forward to the talk at I/O this year that pretty much is concrete evidence we'll see an Android SDK launch for it in May.

I see no reason for them to seed phones again, anyone who wants an Android phone for serious development (or anyone serious about development enough to go to I/O "just for the articles" as they say) probably would have already bought one. Tablets, maybe; I might see them doing an all-out blitz with the Honeycomb release.

The Honeycomb emulator really sucks right now and is pretty much unusable. If they want decent apps as these tablets launch, giving key developers tablet devices might be one way for Google to buy their way out of that problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com