i just needed to quickly put a blogpost together about my annoyance at joikuspot to change the way it handles the word lifetime. i bought joikuspot premium back in 08 when i was using it on my nokia n95. Since then i have been through lots of different nokia phones on trial and test and was shocked to find out that transporting my lifetime license to another phone requires me to purchase another license.
Changing over the license to the new nokia n97 i am testing and playing with proved to fine and although they stated that on this occasion they would transfer it to the new phone for free that in future i would have to pay. how many people keep one phone for a lifetime, how many phones designed today are built to last a lifetime. i would say zero. i find this approach to making users "pay again" out of order and abusing the word lifetime.
What annoyed me the most was the response i got because it makes out that i am asking for free licenses and that i should have to deal with it as the customer that they use the wrong type of payment/tracking system to take payments. I'm the customer - i should not have to worry about that stuff. lifetime is exactly that, i have paid for the usage of your software for life. you mention nothing about the lifetime of the phone and even the most stupid person in the world realizes that mobile phones do not last these days.
As i trial lots of phones i was worried how i would get around this until i noticed that they give a 30 day trial so this should be more than enough time for each trial unit. It does make me wonder why i bothered purchasing the license thou if i cannot just transfer it to another device. I would strongly suggest not to purchase one if you are regularly testing phones.
The email i had back is below.
I wish I could say no, but unfortunately I can't. The license manager JoikuSpot uses (http://www.openbit.com/index.jsp?file=technology) doesn't allow this kind of behavior.
We provided you with a new code because you had bought the application when it was lifetime. Otherwise we wouldn't have done that but you should have bought a new license for N97 as well.
I would like to mention that we are a very small company and we get our main income from JoikuSpot. Please understand that therefore we can't distribute free licenses. By buying a new license, which is very cheap, you will support our software development further.
We are very sorry for the inconvenience our license policy causes you.
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update - i had more problems with the software but found out i had a code for a different version - joikuspot vs the one in my device which was the the ROM build (as in the one that ships with the device i presume) i also got this in an email - "note that one license can be used either with 1 phone + 2 SIM or 1 SIM + 2 phones. This is to pervent the illegal use of the license codes"
