By Rob Pegoraro
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Buying any sort of high-tech product involves risks not faced with most other purchases. The sweater you get for yourself probably won't cost dramatically less next year or be replaced in stores by a vastly upgraded Sweater 3.0, but your new laptop, camera or phone can become overpriced or obsolete within weeks.
We accept that risk as the price of constant innovation. But some technological products represent too much of a gamble.
These things may not cost an insane amount of money; some have even drawn initially positive reviews in this space. They do, however, incorporate too many question marks -- about their compatibility, their programming, their future prospects -- and individual users can do little to turn that punctuation into periods.
You're better off leaving these things on the shelf and hoping that the companies behind them get their act together next year:
· Blu-ray players. Prices for these high-definition video disc players have not dropped as much as many people once hoped -- budget $250 or more-- while the selection of Blu-ray titles remains far smaller than what's available on DVD. (Netflix stocks "nearly 1,100" Blu-ray titles, about one-hundredth of its DVD catalogue.) Some cheaper Blu-ray players don't support such interactive features as "BD-Live" games and widgets and can't be upgraded to add them.
Yes, if your DVD player burns out tomorrow, you'll need a new one. But for a third of the price of a Blu-ray player, you could pick up a DVD player that "upconverts" regular discs, amplifying their picture to near-HD quality; for two thirds of the price, you could buy an upconverting model that also records TV shows on rewritable DVDs.
· Satellite radio. The merger of former competitors Sirius and XM has mainly yielded confusion and anger, as customers have found favorite channels disappearing from these still-separate programming lineups with no notice. The company says it's giving each service's listeners a chance to enjoy channels once confined to the other, but in the process, good, original programs have gone silent and familiar DJs have been kicked to the curb.
A receiver that could tune in to both Sirius and XM broadcasts would address this problem, but no such thing is in stores. Until this company puts one on the market, stops gutting its programming and starts communicating its plans clearly to customers, why reward it with your money?
· Set-top Internet video boxes. The idea of bringing Internet video to a big screen has enough appeal for dozens of companies to sell Internet-connected receivers that plug into TV sets. But these devices usually come handcuffed to one or two sources of online programming.
So, for example, Roku's $99.99 Netflix Player downloads only movies from that service, Apple's $229 Apple TV supports only iTunes Store video downloads and YouTube clips, and both devices ignore the shows available at TV network sites and such third-party hubs as Hulu. Hackers have written software for some of these devices that tune into these alternate sources; perhaps in six months or a year, some manufacturers will have taken the hint.
· Android mobile phones. Google's Android wireless phone software represents the most exciting change to the cellphone business since the arrival of the iPhone, with its elegant, capable Web browser and growing selection of add-on software. But for now, the Android universe consists of a single cellphone, T-Mobile's G1. This phone relies on a mobile broadband network that, even after a growth spurt, covers far less territory than other carriers' services.
The somewhat blocky G1 ($179.99) also can't match the style of many of its rivals. So if your current hardware can hold out for a little longer, wait and see what other manufacturers and carriers can do with Google's software (which could use a bug fix or two in its own right).
· E-book readers. Amazon's Kindle is a fascinating device, but this year-old electronic-book reader could also stand to get a few refinements to its design -- starting with faster screen redrawing and an arrangement of buttons that doesn't make it so easy to hit "next page" when you pick up the thing.
The inventory of books available for the Kindle, in turn, ought to be wider and offer a bigger discount from bound volumes. At current Kindle e-book prices, you'll be waiting a long time to recover your initial investment in this $359 device. Other e-book readers are in an even worse situation because they don't offer the Kindle's quick, simple over-the-air downloads.
Sitting out on all of these technologies doesn't come without risk: Not all of these gadgets may survive to next year if enough people join you in avoiding them today. But for most non-gadget-freak types, the upgrades these devices can offer don't make up for the uncertainty they represent. Somebody has to hold these companies accountable for that imbalance; why not you?
Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at robp@washpost.com. Read more at http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/
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