Palm Pilot Free Software

It Just Doesn't Work: Why New Tech Products Are Increasingly Unsatisfying

When Steve Jobs is delighted with a new Apple product — which, as you may be aware, he usually is — he flatters it with three simple words: "It just works." Anyone who tried Apple's Mobile Me service in the months immediately following its release knows that reality doesn't always live up to Jobs' promise of magical simplicity. But at least the company tries to make things just work. Lately, though, I've been wondering whether some of its competitors are doing the same.

I've been reviewing technology products for 20 years now. I've seen it all, from products that were amazing from the get-go (the first PalmPilot comes to mind) to ones that were downright hazardous (a mouse that caught on fire). But there's never been a time when so much of the new stuff I look at is so very far from being ready for mass consumption. Sometimes it's a tad quirky; sometimes I can't get it to work at all. And when I call the manufacturers for help, they're often well aware of the problems I encountered.

What's going on here? There are three main culprits:

The beta culture. Once upon a time, products that were labeled as beta were indeed undergoing beta testing. They were works in progress, and nobody dreamed of sharing them with the general public. The Internet changed that by making it easy to distribute prereleases to millions of people. And then Google rendered the beta moniker largely meaningless by applying it indefinitely to massively popular services like Gmail. (The company has since largely backed away from beta gimmickry; among other reasons, it discovered that big corporate customers aren't so excited by products that claim to be unfinished.)

A world in which anything can be a beta is a world in which no product must be complete. That might be O.K. if you're talking about free software, but the philosophy is rubbing off on hardware that people pay hundreds of dollars for. Even if companies don't call hardware beta, they clearly think of it that way.

One notable example was Motorola's Xoom tablet , which arrived back in February with rain checks for three of its notable features: 4G support, Flash and support for its MicroSD slot. Today, some owners have the update that enables MicroSD, others don't, and everyone's still waiting for the overdue 4G upgrade. Sounds like a beta product to me.

Oddly enough, the products that Google labels as betas are usually more refined than ones that some companies claim are complete. But when I tried the Samsung Series 5 , a "Chromebook" that runs Google's Chrome OS, it kept locking up and requiring reboots. Beta!

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