Updated: Be Careful what you Wish.com for

I started using Wish.com about two months ago after I learned a little about the company.

It seems they had (at the time I encountered the info a few weeks ago) most of the over one billion dollars of the investment capital they had received remaining to be spent. More importantly they are apparently trying to eliminate fake goods from their site. Wish, as I understand it, supply goods direct from countries such as China at a heavily discounted price, the trade-off being that shipping is usually quite slow.

This gave me confidence in using the site and I have managed to purchase a couple of items that seem of satisfactory quality… However…

It seems things that at least some items are oversold. As mentioned, I’ve purchased a few Micro SD cards through them, and it appears despite the listing information they have been too good to be true. Let me elaborate.

First off I ordered a pair of 512GB Micro SD cards listed as Class 10 speed and at a price that appeared too good to be true, as indeed it was. The cards do seem to be fast enough to use in the 1080p camera I use on my bicycle, but for expanding the app space on a Kindle Fire (their original purpose) they are very slow. Ditto for file transfers in general. Filling up that 512GB would take a very long time.

Compared to other Class 10 cards I have, the speed was quite shocking, but the size does appear to be correct so far, in as much as I’ve filled up a few GB of data with no issue, but not approached anywhere near the full capacity.

So then I ordered two 256GB cards listed at 633x speed. I’d love to tell you how fast these are, but despite a delivery estimate of two weeks ago I’ve yet to receive them, so I guess I may be able to report on the Wish.com refund process if they don’t arrive soon.

In the meantime I ordered and received another 512GB Micro SD card (this one apparently being U3 speed – awesome!!!). Again I rant this through a benchmark and it came out slower than the initial cards!!!! Real world file transfers are also very sluggish, but I have managed to use it for transferring some files between a laptop and Raspberry Pi.

Virtually all the reviews of this card (and several others) show people generally reporting that they are happy. The devil is in the detail here though, as it appears 99% of these people are saying “the card arrives quickly but I’m yet to use it”, with a few saying “it works OK in my phone”. Only a very few people appear to have used actually the card. Of them only a few report it as slow.

I wrote a review to join the couple of other reporting on the lack of advertised speed. With this review I added a screenshot of my CrystalMark benchmark findings. It appears the test was accepted, but the image rejected. I guess that explains why every image in the reviews is of the physical card itself.

Call me old fashioned, but I find this fishy. I’ll leave you to decide how you feel about this.

I’m currently waiting for Wish.com to deliver a Toshiba Exceria 256GB Micro SD card. I already have an old 128GB version of this (benchmarked – it’s very fast) so I’ll be interested to see how this on compares if it ever arrives. Apparently it arrived in the UK today. I’ll report back in the comments.

So, so far my experience has been mixed, to the point where if this final card is of similar quality to the three I’ve already received, I’ll go back to paying 3 times the price for merchandise from 7DayShop or Amazon instead.

One final note, I’m also somewhat alarmed at some of the products listed at wish.com, notable flick knives, knives disguised as credit cards, knuckle dusters, hemp seeds, etc.

In one stroke this makes me question the legitimacy of the site as a whole, especially with this stuff appearing on the main browse screen of the app. Some of their teeth whitening products look a bit scary too.

So overall wish.com seems an interesting site. I’m sure I’ll order more from there in the future, but I’m going to be increasingly cautious about what I’m getting myself into. In a nutshell, at this point in time for me, it’s fair to say other retailers will still be seeing my business.

Essentially, buyer beware. The site seems legitimate, but the product selection isn’t the best quality in my experience.

 

UPDATE

Right on cue the “Toshiba” card arrived. I’ll let you decide how kosher it is.

Here’s the original from Amazon:

And the card from the Wish.com supplier:

It’s interesting that the read speed is fractionally higher, but that write speed is criminally (and unusably) bad.

Advertisement

Time to Look Again at FireFox?

Eons ago all we had was the Mosaic we browser (not strictly true, but that was the big one).

No matter, Netscape came to the rescue with many of the Mosaic team on board, added the blink tag, and started charging for essentially the same thing.

Somewhere along the line Microsoft woke up to the internet and started knocking out their own Internet Explorer for free, eventually bundling it with the OS and taking 95% market share.

A lot of people took issue with this, and it formed the core of the anti-trust lawsuit that shaped Microsoft to this day.

I was suspicious of Microsoft abusing their powers back then, but I could see the logic in using the same rendering engine in the browser for the OS itself, I quite liked IE3 (the proprietary extensions and lack of standards didn’t concern me back then), and Netscape was large and wasn’t yet free.

After a while my Main browser became IE. It worked well for me. Netscape faded away.

Somewhere later along the line Netscape transformed into FireFox in an attempt to right some of the wrongs that Netscape had come to be known for (primarily bloat) and to claw back some of the gains made by Internet Explorer which would see it reach 95% market share.

It worked to a large extent. FireFox was more standards compliant, lighter and faster than IE, and gradually millions of people started to switch.

But as time went on FireFox also started to suffer from bloat. Microsoft had all but lost interest with IE failing to make any significant updates for years. And then there was Chrome.

Google launched its own web browser that was sleek and the world started to take notice. Chrome was to eventually take the crown from a neglected IE, and a struggling FireFox.

Microsoft tried to fight back with later versions of IE, and subsequently Edge (which has become my primary browser, with Chrome always on standby), while FireFox and others like Opera carved out more of a niche market and held onto their respective diehards.

But now it appears the Mozilla Foundation has been hard at work reworking FireFox to correct its ills and prepare it for a bright new future. But with the likes of Edge and Chrome providing a very good gateway to the internet, is there still a place for FireFox on my desktop.

I have some good memories of FireFox being a good browser, and am interested in taking a look out of curiosity, but I’m not sure this is enough to spur me into action.

Has anyone out there used the new release? I’d be interested to know what you think.

If I do give it a try, I’ll be sure to let you all know what I think.