Your worst ever gadget?

[Fingers]

A motorola phone whose model number escapes me.

It was utter shite - the menu system was completely without logic, the sound quality on calls rubbish, and the battery life shockingly poor. It was from the days when a sim card was the same size as a credit card

One of these? yes. i had one. It was shockingly shite in every conceivable manner.

 

[Badgers]

Motarolla V50

I had one of these as a 'stop-gap' phone once and concur regarding the general shitness

 

[FaradayCaged]

Sony PSP - Total crapness

Minidisc - Recorded songs at real time - Total crapness

 

[editor]

Here's a few:

Badly Designed Consumer Products 'Named & Shamed' June 19, 2008
Next time you're down the supermarket don't forget to pick up your usual carton of 5-eggs. Not quite half a dozen but then that's all the Bosch KGU30605 Fridge will take, thanks to a 5, instead of 6-egg, tray.

Online product reviews site, Reevoo, has published a list of what UK consumers found to be the worst designed products they have had the pleasure of purchasing.


"It's amazing that products with these and many other design flaws are allowed to leave the factory floor. We have bought eggs by the half-dozen in this country for decades, so it is fairly incredible that we are designing fridges with egg trays that can't house a full box. Customers buy products in good faith, and at the very least expect the manufacturer to have thought about how they are going to be used."

To be fair to the Bosch KGU30605 Fridge, most people liked it despite being cheated out of that one egg. The Top 10 dodgy products are as follows:

1. Bosch KGU30605 Fridge - the egg tray which only holds five eggs instead of the standard six.
2. Zanussi ZWF14581 Washing Machine - The default temperature when you choose cotton or synthetics is always 60 degrees. But almost all synthetics are labelled 40 degrees or less.
3. LG 37LF66 Television - that doesn't turn off. You have to pull the plug out of the wall to turn the TV off.
4. Easy Store Large Slide - the bright yellow colour attracts thousands of bugs in summertime.
5. Kenwood DW12CFE Dishwasher - Normal sized plates stacked as design suggests in the bottom tray stop the spray arm spinning, and thus the top layer does not get washed. Trays are non removable so the dishwasher won't run without the top tray in. Hard to fit standard sized dinner plates.
6. LM Tech Battery Powered Heated Gloves - the heating element doesn't get warm, and doesn't cover the fingers.
7. Carlton CTD1W Table Top Dishwasher - doesn't fit standard mugs on the shelf
8. Elba C96DF 90 Gas Oven - the knobs heat up when the grill is turned on
9. Hotpoint RLA21 4.6 Cu.ft. Larder Fridge - there is no light inside so it is impossible to see all the food at the back.
10. UNI MEDIA 22/1 IDTVDVD 22" HD Ready digital television - It is impossible to adjust the picture when the picture adjustment box pops up in the middle of the screen and covers most of the picture.
http://www.reevoo.com/

 

[editor]

The Casio WQV-1 wristwatch camera:

Capable of taking grayscale images at an astounding 120*120 pixels. In good light conditions. At close range. So long as you held you wrist really still...

I don't know what I was thinking.... I wanted to be Bond....

I had the WQV-2 and it was kinda fun: http://www.urban75.org/watchcam/index.html

 

[dylanredefined]

Finger torch little finger torch that Velcro's to your finger .fell apart leaving me with no light at all .Only real gadget that has let me down and given me grief.
Oh and a electronic orgnisers note book and pen is far better for me .

 

[Sunray]

Nice to see Motorola are getting the plaudits they deserve.

 

[beesonthewhatnow]

Nice to see Motorola are getting the plaudits they deserve.

Have they ever released a decent product?

 

[ovaltina]

The Sony NWA8000. Pretty but stupid MP3 player that was billed as the ipod killer.

The software was awful. Sonicstage, which used to crash all the time and wouldn't play normal MP3s, which was replaced by Connect, a much worse piece of crap that even NASA would have struggled to get working. The internet was abuzz with irate buyers, and because sales were so poor nobody bothered writing a viable alternative.

Eventually I broke the screen, so it wasn't even pretty anymore, then somebody stole it from my coat pocket at the 2 brewers. I wasn't too upset.

 

[pinkmonkey]

I had one for these for a month before it broke

It had sonic stage on it, need I say more? The sliding lid has a piece of feeble plastic inside it thats about 1mm thick. This will invariably break, meaning the usb connector will stay sticking out permanently, meaning it won't play tunes anymore.

I note there is more than one website devoted to how shit it is.

 

[samk]

alorra old mobile phones here, maybe someone should make a commemorative one with a modern circuitboard placed in an actual hollowed-out brick

 

[Crispy]

Mine was the original Archos HD MP3 player. Just about everything that you could get wrong with this device was wrong with it. Terrible build quality (it broke),weighed loads, big and bulky, terrible interface and a short battery life with removable but proprietary batteries.

Hah! I had one of those. Fucking awful machine it was. The shame. It's also my worst ever gadget, no contest.

the headphone socket went after about 12 months and then needed to be held in with sticky tape. Useless.

 

[Sunray]

alorra old mobile phones here, maybe someone should make a commemorative one with a modern circuitboard placed in an actual hollowed-out brick

Do it! Make it a retrospective and it might win the turner prize.

 

[Sunray]

Its odd isn't, you know its shit, but you persevere, possibly out of pride. When someone nicks it, or it breaks its like a weight off your shoulders, relief at not having to fiddle about getting it to play the last track on every album.

The Sony NWA8000. Pretty but stupid MP3 player that was billed as the ipod killer.

The software was awful. Sonicstage, which used to crash all the time and wouldn't play normal MP3s, which was replaced by Connect, a much worse piece of crap that even NASA would have struggled to get working. The internet was abuzz with irate buyers, and because sales were so poor nobody bothered writing a viable alternative.

Eventually I broke the screen, so it wasn't even pretty anymore, then somebody stole it from my coat pocket at the 2 brewers. I wasn't too upset.

 

[Wolveryeti]

I had one for these for a month before it broke

It had sonic stage on it, need I say more? The sliding lid has a piece of feeble plastic inside it thats about 1mm thick. This will invariably break, meaning the usb connector will stay sticking out permanently, meaning it won't play tunes anymore.

I note there is more than one website devoted to how shit it is.

Sony's whole creative development team seems obsessed with this one idea of rebuilding existing technology to make it more lozenge shaped.

This is basically a usb-stick with a microphone jack and lozenge shaped cover, is it not?

 

[FaradayCaged]

This is basically a usb-stick with a microphone jack and lozenge shaped cover, is it not?

most non 'ipod' mp3 players are basically usb-sticks with microphone jacks

 

[PacificOcean]

The N-Gage.

When making a call you had to hold the thing to your ear at the top of the machine - so the screen was facing outwards.

You looked a right knob walking around with a hand held console strapped to your ear.

Least I didn't get a Gizmondo though!

 

[Ich bin ein Mod]

I begged my mum for months to get me this:

I was bored shitless after about 6 hours. It could barely lift anything and took ages to do it and was noisy as hell.

I've still got mine, it really is monumentally shit.

Worst gadget I ever got (present, not purchased) was a pen scanner that copied lines of text from books. Problem was, it misread characters all the time, took forever and was just a faff from start to finish. Far easier to just copy the passages from books instead of scanning them in.