The Dead, the Bad and the Ugly
Product launches must be really tough. Tougher still when the feedback you get is a tongue lashing as rough as a cat's. Courtesy of PC Magazine.
Read on.
Maingear Prysma
Is it a PC? Or a traffic cone? This yellow pyramid of a desktop could be the ugliest thing ever to run Windows. And that's the good news. The bad news is you can't even attach the monitor without help from a screwdriver. The monitor!
Alienware Aurora 7500
We think It's a great PC, if you're wearing earplugs. The Aurora's power supply and cooling fans are so loud, we kept trying to fasten our seat belts and return all tray tables to their full upright and locked positions.
GQ MX-3203
The GQ stands for Great Quality, which is a bit like calling the Big Mac gourmet beef. Sold exclusively at Fry's superstores, this low-cost laptop includes only 256MB of memory and a processor no one's ever heard of. We wouldn't trust it with Windows 95.
Dell Inspiron B130
What happens if you go to Dell.com and buy the cheapest laptop you can find? You quickly return it. We paid just $449 for the bare-bones B130, and when we got it back to PC Labs, every single test score seemed to indicate we were complete idiots.
LG CE500
You could call it a music player. But the same goes for great-grandma's gramophone. LG bills the CE500 as a cell phone that plays music files, but it won't work with AACs, and loading MP3s is a hassle. At least it's smaller than a gramophone.
Wolverine MVP
What self-respecting person would carry this thing? It's the size of a brick. It's candy-apple red. And there's a big white W on the front. It looks like one of those handheld video games you carried to school in the early eighties. And that's being kind.
i.Sound Max Portable (speaker)
Here's how it works: You attach your iPod and the i.Sound Max adds all sorts of hiss and distortion to your favorite music.
Polaroid PDC 5080
We spotted this 5MP Polaroid digital at Target near the $3 disposable cameras—which was a terribly strange place to find it. Compared with the average disposable, it's one laughable piece of junk. That $90 price tag is no bargain. It's a crime.
Olympus Stylus 600
Like many of today's compact digital cameras, the Olympus Stylus takes photos and videos. Well, 15-fps videos. Without any sound. All that's missing are a few title cards and a woman in bad makeup tied to the railroad tracks.
Sanyo Xacti VPC-HD1
For a few months midyear, if you were in the market for a high-def consumer camcorder Sony's HDR-HV3 was your only choice. Then Sanyo unveiled its model—and Sony's was still the only choice.
Sceptre X37
No, that's not a classic black-and-white movie shamelessly colorized by Ted Turner sometime in the mid-1980s. It's a brand-new HD movie shamelessly mangled by the Sceptre X37. You can find more natural colors on that popsicle stick you bought at 7-Eleven.
Chaperone Professional 5.0
Yes, it chaperones the little ones when they're on the home PC. All in all, it does a pretty good job of controlling what your kids can and can't do—if your kids are idiots. Any teenager with an index finger could turn the thing off.
ewido anti-spyware 4.0
In April ewido was brought by Grisoft. Now you get two annoying names for the price of one. You also get an app that identifies malicious code—and very rarely removes it. Grisoft ewido. It takes the anti out of antispyware.
McAfee Total Protection 2006
Total Protection? Not quite. McAfee's security suite can't protect you from McAfee's security suite. During testing, it completely hosed two of our test machines
Windows Live OneCare
Memo to Microsoft: If you're going to run all those poor security companies out of business, at least do it right. This isn't a security suite. It's half a security suite. No antispam. No privacy tools. No parental controls. No kidding.
Google Calendar (beta)
Need an online calendar that syncs with your PC and your PDA? Go to Yahoo! Want an online calendar that's still in beta, won't sync with anything, and completely disappears when there's no Net connection? Go to Google Calendar!
HP Scanjet 4890 Photo Scanner
Scans film and prints! Just like an amateur! According to the box, the Scanjet digitizes film and photos with a 4,800-pixel-per-inch optical resolution and a 48-bit color depth. Those are really good numbers. And the box is lying. A lot.
IRISPen Express
Drag this scanner across a book and words appear like magic on your PC. Of course, they're the wrong words. Well, usually the wrong words. It works great if you spend more time scanning than you would've typing each word from scratch.
Desktop Air Conditioner
There's a much better option. It's called a fan. A fan is quieter and it cools your desk even if you haven't spent 8 hours waiting for your kitchen freezer to put the freeze on the @#%@!& water bottle that came with your desktop air conditioner.
BUSlink Pro 2 Flash Drive
Let's pretend you actually need a 64GB key drive. Let's imagine you'll pay $6,000 for it. The question is: How long until you leave your keys on the subway, saying good-bye to the drive, the six grand, and all 64GB of precious data?
