Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened to a poor boy from Talladega County in Alabama. His well-meaning mother went to Wal-Mart to buy the portable gaming system for her son, but she didn’t know that the box didn’t contain a 3DS at all. Scam artists had apparently bought the 3DS, kept the system itself, but returned the box full of rocks and tissue paper to simulate the missing weight. The Wal-Mart staff never checked the box when processing the return and the faux 3DS ended up on the shelf for the Talladega mom.

This isn’t the first time that something like this has happened. There is a similar scam going around where people are returning iPad boxes filled with paper notepads. I’ve also heard of someone returning a flat panel HDTV with an oven door in its place instead. The lesson here for retail management, as if it weren’t obvious enough, is that their employees should really be checking those returns before refunding the money.

On the bright side, the Talladega Wal-Mart did give the mother a replacement 3DS after she told them what had happened, but I think that poor boy isn’t exactly feeling great about that whole experience.

[Source]

The post Alabama Boy Gets Rocked with Nintendo 3DS Scam appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Having Nexus in its “classic” black, or getting a white phone for whatever cost is the question of personal preferences. However, as the white Nexus show up late for Christmas, they would hardly be in such demand as Samsung may have projected.

If you ask me, when I see cheap plastics on rather expensive phones, it absolutely doesn’t matter to me whether this plastic is white, black, mauve, or whatever.

The post White Nexus Coming To UK in February appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Forgetting the passport is certainly not a good way to start your journey into a foreign territory, especially if the country you are visiting is the United States. But Canadian Martin Reisch managed to gain entry into the US after presenting a scanned copy of his passport on an iPad.

According to the available info, Reisch was traveling to the US to deliver some Christmas gifts to his friend’s children. He might have been too excited about the matter that he forgot about his passport and realized about it only when he was about half an hour away from the border.

Rather than turning back and making a two-hour trek back to his home in Montreal to fetch his passport, Reisch decided to try his luck at crossing the border without the required documents, but with his iPad.

The tablet had a scanned copy of his passport which he had saved in it just, you know, in case.

The US border officer who was presented with the iPad and Reisch’s driver’s licence was reportedly slightly annoyed with the presentation, but was most probably full of Christmas spirit as he allowed Reisch to pass.

According to Reisch, “I thought I’d at least give it a try. He took the iPad into the little border hut. He was in there a good five, six minutes. It seemed like an eternity. When he came back he took a good long pause before wishing me a Merry Christmas“.

Since 2009, Canadians are required to carry with them more than just a driver’s licence for identification for US land border crossings.

Canadian visitors have to produce an enhanced driver’s license, or should be part of the Trusted Traveler Program, or should have, well, a passport. Scans, photocopies or artistic impressions are not in the list. Reisch’s case appears to be an isolated example of flexibility at the US-Canadian border.

Reisch used his iPad once again on his return journey when he showed the device to Canadian Customs, and believes that digital identification will arrive in the near future. He says, “I see the future as 100 percent being able to cross with your identity on a digital device — it’s just a matter of time“.

US Customs and Border Protection hasn’t commented on the matter so far.

The post Canadian Man Uses iPad To Cross US Border appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

The whole idea of engraving your favorite Apple device has been around for a while, many people have it done to iPods they give away. Well, now you can do the same with the Apple iPad.

This comes just in time for your holiday season. Just like the iPod line, the engraving comes for free from Apple and you can have up to two lines of text.  The engraving process can add a couple days to the shipping time, so you’ll want to get orders in a little earlier if it’s going to be a gift.

SOURCE: Apple via BGR

The post Apple to engrave your iPad free appeared first on Mobile Magazine.