Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

(Update 6/7/12: If you want to cut to the chase, I found a much better alternative to the Jawbone. Logitech's Mini Boombox http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005PUZOYM/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER. It's a lot better and a lot cheaper than the Jawbone, and several months in it's still working flawlessly. Highly recommended.) This company should be ashamed of this buggy, defective product and the absolutely useless "customer service" it has in place (and trust me, you WILL be calling customer service if you buy a JAMBOX.) I purchased a new JAMBOX from Amazon on Tuesday, Feb 7th and received it the next day. As it was supposed to be a Valentine's Day gift for my wife, I unboxed the JAMBOX to set it up for her so she could start using it right away. Right out of the box, the JAMBOX worked fine. It wasn't as loud as the reviews had led me to expect it to be, but it had good sound quality and was decently loud for such a small powered speaker. The problems began when I did as the manual recommended and configured the JAMBOX via USB by installing the Jawbone Updater app. This "app" simply launches your web browser and has you set up an account at [...]. at which point your JAMBOX is recognized and updated to the latest firmware. You can also choose a different voice for the device, so it talks back to you in a male or female accent in several different flavors. The software update went fine, the app told me my unit was fully ups to date and ready to go, and that's when my JAMBOX stopped working entirely and never worked right again. The JAMBOX wouldn't pair over Bluetooth anymore with a Mac, a Windows 7 laptop, or an iPad. When it did pair, nothing came out of the speaker but loud static. Even when the JAMBOX wasn't paired with anything, it still had a loud static noise. I Googled the issue and found a ton of people having the same problem, and nobody had found a solution even when dealing with customer service. still, I called customer service anyway to see for myself if these were isolated incidents or not. The first customer service rep I spoke with was a very young woman with zero knowledge of the JAMBOX and no technical understanding at all. It was very obvious she was reading from a telemarketing response tree screen, and she mispronounced L.E.D. "led" as in "Led Zeppelin". She also gave me bogus info about doing a hard reset, which was refuted by... The SECOND customer service rep I spoke with. He told me the 1st rep's advice to press the call button six time quickly and then hold on the 7th time was wrong - instead I should turn the device off, then as soon as I turned it on again, quickly press the call button 6 times to do the hard reset. He actually said, "Yeah, it's really tricky, sometimes it takes 10 tries before the reset works." TEN TRIES?! What kind of nonsense is this? What company puts a product on the market like this without a simple and solid reset option? $25 WiFi routers have a reset button. But a $200 JAMBOX doesn't? Shameful. This being the 21st Century, I'm well accustomed to gadgets shipping with little to no quality control or beta testing, and it's understood that I'll have to Google around a bit to find out what how the hive mind has solved whatever lingering issues any new device has. This is the first time I've ever spent an hour Googling a product problem and finding NOT ONE SINGLE SOLUTION AND/OR SATISFIED CUSTOMER. Don't believe me? Check out JAMBOX's own official forum right here: http://forums.jawbone.com/t5/Jawbone-Speakers/ct-p/speakers. This company spent a ton of money on slick Web videos and buying up all the right gadget reviewers so the JAMBOX would get great buzz. Unfortunately, the JAMBOX itself is a piece of crap. The tech support is non-existent, and even the company's own user forums, where by all rights there should be company representatives answering questions and pointing users toward the right solutions, are only populated by angry buyers like me who feel like suckers for believing the hype about this magical tiny Bluetooth speaker that filled a room with loud, full stereo sound and fit in the palm of your hand. Maybe you'll read this and write me off, thinking "heh, every gadget has a few angry nuts who just like to complain because they're miserable to begin with", etc. But let me tell you something: I have NEVER written an Amazon negative review before, and I've bought thousands of items here. All kinds of tech products. Never have I felt as wholly scammed by a product and a company as I have with this JAMBOX. You've been warned. If I can save one person from the crappy afternoon of fruitless troubleshooting I had today, it was worth the time it took to write this.