Excellent points about Memup from VinmontRD of Crackberry.com
MemoryUp?? Ram Booster?? Does it work? - PinStack.com - BlackBerry forums
jdub71 noticed some of this as well (posted 2 days ago), so I explored a bit more:
Hmmm... since I couldn't find any reviews on my own, I went back to the emobidstudio website to see if THEY could point to any reviews, and here's where it gets interesting:
On the home page, they have a section on the lower left called "awards". They show icons for "topshareware.com with a 5 star rating", "tucows", and a 5-star rating from CNET. I tried, but found that none of these images were clickable.
So I tried going to CNET downloads (where is where the image on the emobistudio site claims the rating should be), and searched for memoryup. No dice: Search for memoryup on CNET yields nothing found.
So - I go to "topshareware.com" and search - no luck here either, "memoryup" cannot be found on topshareware.com.
So - I go to tucows, where emobistudio claims to have received a 4 cow rating. But when I search for memoryup, I get NO HITS.
I looked at the "company" tab on the website, and see a picture of "Robert Wintson", Founder and CEO. Oddly, this is either a misspelling of "Winston", or this is a man with virtually no existence on the Internet, despite appearing to be a software executive who looks to be in his late 50's. Not impossible - but a wee bit suspicious. I can't imagine that, with such a simple website, the CEO would allow a misspelling of his own name - and if it's not a misspelling, then this guy never seems to have existed in the software world before January of this year.
Then I looked at the FAQ page, and there's a picture of "George Mahon", listed as living in "Washington, US". Certainly possible that English isn't George's native language, but the quote they list for him sounds far more as if it were crafted in the Hong Kong headquarters of the company, as they have him saying such gems as, "I have tried MemoryUp for dozens of time and I really like this small but useful software. Today I contact their company for purchase and upgrade information. Their custom service is good, they reply me in a few minutes, telling me their is a free upgrade and each registered user..."
Of course I could be wrong, but this sounds more like Hong Kong written marketing hype than it sounds like an actual quote from "George Mahon" in "Washington, US".
There are NO real tests or reviews for this product. The only mentions on the net for this product and company are clones of their press release and product literature, and links to download and/or purchase the product. That's it. Oddly, although there has been a Symbian version marketed for a few months, there are NO real reviews of the product for that platform either.
The sad state of affairs seems to be that there are thousands of sites that will happily jump on the "sell a product" bandwagon, and promote something that will make them money, even going so far as to mindlessly quote the provided marketing material as if it's fact.
While a company can do quite well promoting a product like this via press releases and remarketing via download sites, wouldn't you think that something this "powerful" - something that can dramatically improve the user experience with a blackberry (or Symbian or S60 phone) - would be submitted to places such as test sites and CNET labs for actually testing and review? That would be SO much more credible.
Re: the positive user experiences - sure - it's possible that this works I imagine. But, as pointed out earlier in this thread, it's a bit suspicious that an unsigned app like this would have low level access to the JVM, and could force a garbage collect and reorganization of the working memory allocated to the JVM, and further that it would be able to do a "smart" analysis of the memory requirements of all the Java programs running at the moment.
Testimonials are worthwhile - sometimes. But you can't necessarily consider them "fact". People WANT to believe that a product works, and there will often be subtle variations in performance that are hard to attribute to any particular factor.
Without measurable, repeatable, figures to back up the claims of this company and product, and with all the items I mentioned above, I'm increasingly skeptical about all of this. It's possible that it may belong in the "antenna booster foil sticker" bin, with all the other fake products on the market...
