What were they thinking when they made these design decisions?
It has recently occurred to me that many gadgets I own feature one truly irritating feature. How some of these nuisances made it through product testing is beyond me, or worse still, are they there just to irritate us consumers? Doubtful, but it sure feels that way at times.
To make this a proper rant, I've thought of five little problems on otherwise good gadgets that really irk me. Here they are:
- Nokia N80 - the tale of the flashing blue light
If anybody out there owns a Nokia N80 mobile phone, you're probably well aware of its "flashing blue light". The light, located on the front of the phone, simply lets you know that the device is switched on. As part of the phone's power saving features, the main display will switch off and the little blue light will flash every 10 seconds or so to let you know your phone isn't dead. Sounds handy enough, right?
Wrong! Come night time and you'll soon notice this seemingly small blue light illuminating your entire room every few seconds. Oh so annoying. There are of course easy workarounds, you can disable the phone's sleep mode - that'll leave the display on at all times, unfortunately, that'll mean reducing the already terrible battery life. Alternatively, you could simply turn the phone over so the blue light gets covered up (that's what I've been doing ever since I had the phone). Last but not least, you could chuck the phone out the window. I've come close to that solution on a few occasions.
Come on Nokia! Did you not see this blue light annoying people when you made the phone? Why there isn't an option to disable it completely is beyond me.
- Samsung LCD TV - a remote control lacking useful buttons
Here's another little nuisance that somehow manages to really get to me. My 32" Samsung LCD TV (you'll have to excuse me for not knowing the model number by heart, anybody who can remember Samsung's model numbers deserves an award) is an all round good TV, but its remote control is a real let down.
One of the TV's key features is that it allows multiple inputs, plenty of connectivity and a few HDMI ports make it an ideal TV for me. The trouble however is getting to those various inputs. The remote control, designed with Samsung's infinite wisdom, has only one button labelled 'Source'.
Pressing this button will allow you to switch from Digital TV, TV, Ext 1, Ext 2, HDMI 1 and HDMI 2. That's a total of 6 sources, and you need to go through them one by one to get to the one you need. It wouldn't be so bad if the transition between sources was instant but no, it takes at least a few seconds for each change. If for example I want to play on my Xbox 360, I'll need to turn the TV on and flick through sources until I get to HDMI 1. The unresponsive remote usually means I end up going past HDMI 1 and then going round once again - oh the joy.
It's so annoying in fact that it even deters me from playing on my Xbox console! My Pioneer plasma screen on the other hand comes with a remote control that has four buttons across the top: "Input 1, Input 2, Input 3 and Input 4". Bless you Pioneer, bless you.
- Oregon Scientific alarm clock - projects time, makes annoying sound
I've got one of those really cool Oregon Scientific alarm clocks. It's cool in the sense that the time is radio controlled - I never need to set it, never need to worry about the time being right and better still, never need to change the time in accordance to daylight saving, it just does it all for me. Another oh-so-cool feature is that the alarm clock will project the time onto my ceiling, sounds like a gimmick but I actually use it all the time. It even tells me the temperature, that's kinda handy too.
The trouble with this alarm clock however is its standard sound options. By default, the clock will beep every hour. Why oh why would you want an alarm clock to beep every hour? That's 24 beeps a day, which is 8,760 beeps a year. It drives you nuts. It can be disabled of course, but get a power outage and the clock will reset itself and re-enable the beeping once again.
For an alarm clock that does everything else itself, it's just plain odd that they chose to have this sound enabled as default. It's a right beeping annoyance!
- Samsung G600 - inability to utilise memory card and more
I also happen to own and use a Samsung G600 mobile phone. For the most part, it's a great phone. It looks smart, it's thin, light and has a very good battery life. Whilst the phone has so much to like, there are a few items that defy belief.
First up, you can't truly customise the tone associated with the arrival of SMS messages. There are four available tones to choose from (all of which are below average) and that is that. For a modern mobile phone, it's just strange not to be able to customise your SMS tone to something more personal.
Secondly, this phone can only store 200 SMS text messages. That might not be a problem for most, but what puzzles me is that the phone ships with a 512MB memory card. You can choose to store photos, videos, music and other content on the card, but the phone is unable to utilise the card for text messages. Why!? Just a simple option to allow users to store additional messages on the memory card as opposed to the onboard memory would raise the max number of messages from 200 to thousands.
Last but not least, dynamic wallpapers. One of the G600's cool features is that its default background of London's Big Ben is dynamic. As time passes during the day, the image will change from daylight to night and you'll get moving components such as birds flying by or shooting stars in the night. It really is quite fancy. The trouble is, there is only one dynamic wallpaper! Why haven't they provided a selection? I've read that the wallpaper changes based on location, so if you were to own a G600 in a different country, my guess is the wallpaper would be of a city closer to you. I'm only guessing though, I haven't seen any other dynamic wallpapers myself.
They are just a few minor faults, but had Samsung addressed them, this phone would have been mighty close to perfection. It's so annoying that such little problems plague the device.
- Microsoft's Xbox 360 - playing two player games just isn't easy
The Xbox 360 is arguably my favourite console to date, up there alongside the Super Nintendo. It has a great collection of games and its online services are unmatched.
However, despite being so easy to play with millions from around the world, it isn't easy at all to play with someone sat next to you. Try playing a two player game on the Xbox 360 and both players are forced to sign into a gamer profile. Why would they make it so inconvenient? Two player games are often played with random friends. I may have someone over who just fancies a quick game of Rockstar's Table Tennis. Back in the day, you'd just connect two joypads and away you go. Nope, not on the Xbox 360, you both need to be signed in. Doesn't matter if you'll only be playing for 5 minutes or that you may never play on the same console again, you've still got to sign in. It's just silly!
So, there we have it. Those are five gadgets that irritate me with their little annoyances. Do you have any gadgets that annoy you due to a lack of features or worse still - features that don't seem to make any sense? Voice your frustrations in the HEXUS forums.
