"It's frustrating trying to get a straight story," said D.C. resident Tim Fenton of his experiences as a gadget shopper. "There are so many choices, so many options, it's hard to figure out what you want."
Fenton couldn't figure out whether he wanted to get a handheld with the wireless standards WiFi and Bluetooth built in or whether the two technologies would be redundant. He got a Palm that has WiFi but not Bluetooth, though he now almost wishes he'd originally gotten a cell phone with Bluetooth months ago -- because then getting a Bluetooth-compatible handheld might have been worthwhile.
"But who's going to tell you that?" he asked.
Fenton is now engrossed in the process of not buying a wireless router for his home, because he's not sure exactly what he needs.
NPD Group analyst Stephen Baker figures this sort of confusion is the inevitable result of companies competing to grab consumers' attention and dollars with technologies still in their infancy. "The economics require you to find a mass market for your products as fast as you can," he said. "The economics demand you to sell it, maybe, before it's ready."
Steve Gordon, vice president of technical support at Linksys, the division of Cisco Systems Inc. that makes wireless routers, says that Linksys's products are getting easier for folks to use out of the box, according to the company's numbers. "We ship millions of products every month and we don't get millions of calls every month," he said. "Every product we release gets fewer and fewer calls per unit."
For those consumers who do end up making a purchase and having to place that phone call to tech support, the thrill of a new gadget these days comes at that delayed moment when they get it to work.
Washington resident Bill Morocco recently spent eight hours on the phone with tech support folks in India trying to get a Linksys wireless broadcaster to talk to a PC and a Mac he wanted to get plugged in wirelessly to a DSL connection.
Morocco doesn't begrudge the time he spent on the phone; he's just happy that he has gotten his laptop to connect wirelessly to the Internet on the new setup. "It's amazing how, when you turn it on, the home page actually comes on," he said. "It's like having a baby or something."
