Does the Thync work? Yup. Gonna keep it? Nope.

I've just packed the Thync up to send back before I'm charged for it.  It does work - I did do a semi-blind test and it seems to have the desired effects.  Aside from my other complaints - if you follow the directions exactly it's relatively painless and does seem to actually do what it says.  If you need or want something to perk you up or to calm you down it's worth it.

- if the 'power' level is too low, the sensation feels very much like 'bees in your head' as one of my victims said.  I'm not sure he listened to too much Nicki Minaj but this seems pretty accurate

 The lower power has a weird, skin-crawling feel that's not appealing at all.  If you don't know to turn it higher - this is the point you'd take it off and send it back.  I don't have much sense, so I turned it higher.

- if the power is too high, there's a eldritch pinching sensation that runs around your entire skull.  Not great either.  Getting to the sweet spot between the two is hard.

If everything is just right - there's no weird feelings and it works.  Anything else it's miserable.

I know how to work it now - but it's just honestly not useful enough for me.  I'm sure a lot of folks really could use this - but they aren't going to see it and they aren't going to be able to figure it out.

There are other complaints too (I'm full of complaints :-P ) - when I cancelled the order and requested an RMA, good marketing would offer a discount to keep the device in my hands rather than send it back and take the re-manufacturing charge.  I just got a generic Salesforce email with a bar code and that was it.  And I didn't get any 'you doing okay?' emails from Thync either.  And I didn't get any direct contact from them from these articles either.  I'm a moderate net celebrity (I'm more famous than most of the people in P90X at least) and I didn't get a peep.  I complained about VMWare's cloud offering sucking and I got lots of direct tweets and messages from them offering to help.

Anyway - the Thync experiment is done.  I don't see these guys being around in another year.  It's good hardware and technology - but I see lots of money being burned but not much coming in.

Thync Set up

Set up is pretty easy over all - it's a Bluetooth device, so you download the app (which for some bizarre reason isn't tagged for running on a tablet, so it's phone or nothing), sync the device, and start watching long rambling videos featuring a chirpy blonde chick who is the voice of 'calm'.  There's Mr. Energy who shows up later and sounds like a wired frat boy from Central Casting - but he never appears so I'm assuming he was mangled horribly in the creation of the device.  

Chirpy starts off on leading you through calm, so if you don't want to be calm you're pretty much out of luck.  First step is putting the device on your head right - where something else sort of weird crops up.  The designers had a great idea to put a picture in picture app in - but the implementation is weird.  The front camera on your phone reverses things in real time just because that's the ways optics work.  Things are always backwards and upside down - it's easy to swap the upside down but the mirror image swap is expensive and happens after the 'save' of any selfies.

You then get to watch Chirpy put the device on her head in corrected video - and then you are supposed to ape her by watching your reversed image and doing everything she does but with your other hand on the other side of your head.  Yeah, this doesn't help - and I did a terrible job first time.  Just look.

I don't know if the Thync people live in some mirror reality - but this is a pretty wretched experience overall and I could see a lot of people tossing this thing down by this point.  This is a cool idea - but Chirpy needs to be reversed.  Just like the iPhone thing and the blow in card - this is pretty obvious to anyone doing a walk through and could be fixed in 5-10 minutes of work.  This is a transformation that Adobe does in 5-10 seconds plus the minute for Googling.

So far, pretty horrible.  But does it work?  Funny you should ask - sounds like another blog posting for later...  

I Thync I can...

The Thync comes packaged nicely, like you would expect.  The electrode strips come in little sealed bags with the two flavors of them:

Energy

Calm (it's working already!)

Mine had some sort of weird funk or rouge on the actual device that looked like it was tested on a circus clown - sort of gross, but it looked like maybe tacky adhesive.  I used some alcohol pads to get it off before putting it anywhere near my precious face.  There were a couple of things that I found weird from my perspective looking through the docs.  Top one was that they only mentioned iOS.  Seriously.  iOS has a really strong following in some very specific groups - but hardcore techies overwhelmingly use Android.  Android is 83+% of the market.   iOS is substantial - but middle managers and educators are not going to be lining up to stick electrodes on their heads.


There was one thing that really annoyed me in the packaging - check out this:

I don't know who the hell this Izy dude is - but I do know that printing cards on heavy stock with embossing isn't cheap, and adding stuff like this to kits isn't cheap either.  Unless this guy paid for this particular part of the box himself - doing something like this cost $20-50k of some investor's money for a bit of self-promotion.  Could be wrong, but this makes me angry just to look at.

Next up - setting it up...