Technological Gizmos: Which Ones Truly Improved Your Life, Which Ones Were Duds?

In My Humble Opinion
1

In thinking of the must-have technological gizmos that I’ve bought, and wanted to buy, over the past few years, some have truly made a difference in my life. Others have failed to live up to what I thought they were going to be.

Truly Made a Positive Difference in My Life

  1. DVR - Has completely changed the way I watch TV. I used to go through TV Guide with a highlighter and highlight what I wanted to watch each week, and make sure to either record it on my VCR or rush home in time to see it live. Now I watch what I want, when I want, with no commercials. And I don’t have to worry about loading a tape into the VCR each week at the appointed time - all my shows are recorded automatically, every time. The only thing I watch live any more is sports broadcasts.

  2. Satellite Radio - I never listen to terrestrial radio now. And even though I somewhat regret choosing XM over Sirius, satellite is still leaps & bounds better than terrestrial. Having 160 channels to choose from, many of which are commercial-free, without fear of losing a channel as I drive down the road, is so worth the money! And I get a much wider variety of music, too. No way am I ever going to hear Jazz, New Age, Bluegrass, or other genres.

Didn’t Pan Out

  1. GPS - Learning my elevation and my longitute & latitude was cool at first, but once the novelty wore off I started to feel that I didn’t get my money’s worth. I could see it being useful for travel, but I rarely travel to places where I’m not already familiar with the roads. I wouldn’t call it a waste of money, but I don’t think I got as much from it as I hoped.

  2. Portable DVD Player - The battery is only good for two hours – barely enough for one movie. And most of the time when I’m traveling, I’m driving, so I can’t watch a DVD anyway.

Waiting to See How It Works Out

  1. MP3 player - I’m getting myself an 80GB Zune for my birthday next month. I’ve listened to friends’ MP3 players and been amazed. Here’s hoping!

  2. HDTV - I’ve watched on my mom’s, my MIL’s, and some friends’ TV’s, and the difference has been stunning. Mrs. Homie can’t tell the difference for love or money (neither can my mom). I’m hoping that Mrs. Homie will catch on once we get one at Christmas and she watches day to day.

2

I’m 36 years old, so the personal computer is essentially an innovation of my time. As fun gizmos go, it’s hard to top that.

3

Yeah, you can’t beat having a computer in the house, especially since the internet. The access to information is mind-boggling.

I’ll also second the DVR. It allows me to actually watch TV, since I can now record everything I want to see and watch it after the kids are in bed (rather than my previous method of attempting to watch a show and only being able to hear bits and pieces of it).

4

Yeah, the internet changed my life AND my work - I’m a librarian.

I have to agree on the DVR and the satellite radio. Also my iPod.

Do you count Netflix? It’s really a service, but it depends on the Internet for real functionality.

5

Things that worked out

GPS - I was driving to California last week and I fancied a scenic detour. The GPS helpfully told me to take a right onto the Death Valley Highway, then hang a right at the Opera House.

iPod - why bother with 160 channels of satellite radio when I can choose what I listen to, when I want to.

Tivo. I don’t watch live TV any more. If I’m driving through Death Valley and I hear a rumour of a good new TV show, I go online with my iPod and tell Tivo to record it.

Why yes, I do love my gadgets. What gave it away?

6

I got a remote control for my PC (the ATI Remote Wonder). I ditched the DVD player, ditched cable and have been “watching TV” on my computer for about 5 years now. It has actually changed my life.

I got a wireless video camera to put in my garage so I could watch for my dog wanting to come in. The reception was good for a bit but I haven’t kept up with tuning it and I never turn it on. And the dog has learned to “knock” so I don’t need to see her. I thought it would be hella cool but now it’s just $175 worth of “meh.”

7

Ruling out the obvious Computer/Internet suggestion, I’m going to throw out there:

Life-Changing

Cellphones. I can talk to anyone, any time, communicate with friends on the other side of the country, take and send photos,

GPS. I drive a lot, and like to visit museums and other historic sites. It would take me ages to try and track down directions using Whereis.com.au, but with a GPS I just punch in the address and the unit will navigate me to right outside the front door of pretty much anywhere in the entire country.

DVD players. DVD movies are a vast improvement over VHS, I can get more of them into the same space, and I can watch them on my PC as well as in the lounge. They’re versatile and have greatly enhanced my Entertainment Viewing experience.

Digital Cameras. They’ve put control of photography back into the hands of the photographer. I can take thousands of photos on my Digital Camera, upload them to me computer, share them with family and friends, use them as illustrations for my articles, and if one doesn’t turn out, I can just delete it at the time and take another, instead of waiting for a week to discover that Uncle Harry had his eyes closed in the Official Photo of everyone at the Family Union That Everyone Was Able To Get To For The First Time In History.

USB Drives. Vital for my writing and research work- I don’t know how I managed without them in the past.

Not much use to me at all, really

iPods/Dedicated Portable MP3 players. I work 50 hours a week plus. I drive to work, in a car with an MP3 CD stereo. When I’m not at work I’m either at home with my computer (which plays MP3s) or my wife, in which case I’d rather be talking to or spending time with her than being Captain AntiSocial listening to music. In short, I have no use for an iPod or portable MP3 player.

DVD-R. There’s nothing on TV that I’d actually want to record to watch later, but we don’t have Pay TV so that might change if we get Austar. I can see why it’s useful for some people, but not for me.

8

The good:
Any computer I’ve ever owned.

Ditto for video games and consoles.

My laboratory’s Marantz PMD670 portable solid state audio recorder. It features the user interface from hell, but now that I’ve figured out how to use the damn thing, thirty seconds of fiddling and I’m a-go for 40% of the recording I need to do.

Any of our stationary ultrasound machines: Coolest. Scanning technology. EVER. Working with a tough to diagnose speech sound? Feeling lazy? Just plain bored? Just find a consultant without dental fillings who is dedicated and willing to put up with the “stab you in the throat” tight fit that the scanner head requires, and bam! Instant, high-res video of the tongue moving in realtime.

The bad:
Any of our portable ultrasound machines. Handy? Check. Essential to a lot of our research? Check. Prone to spontaneously breaking or manifesting impossible-to-diagnose fing bastard hardware problems in the middle of your fing bastard dissertation and staying broken for 16 f*ing bastard months? That’d be a check. :slight_smile:

9

The PC and DVR/Tivo are going to be the big winners of this thread. MP3 players and cell phones will fight it out for the bronze.

I’m having trouble thinking of gizmos that were disappointing, though I’m sure there have been a few. We had a fancy electronic scale that was a waste of time and money. You program it with your height and gender, and it figures out your body fat % in addition to giving you your weight. Well, who gives a fuck? I don’t want to hit a button and wait for my scale to boot up, and I don’t want to have to keep it in the closet because water might destroy it if it’s in the bathroom. I just want to stand on an analog scale and get my weight within 2 seconds.

10

HeyHomie, you might look at this as a sort of hijack. Sarahfeena and Szofia, I agree about the internet being one of the premier technological inventions of the age. In my case, they keep me in touch with family…I see pics of my newborn grandkids (in another state) to ooh & ahh over before I pass them on to my great-grandma.

In regard to the dvd (yes, it has replaced vcr tapes of movies & tv shows), ipods, mp3’s, etc, might I comment about how I spent Thursday night, 7/18? My daughter & her husband went to a concert (Wierd Al Yankovic, a favorite of hers).

My husband & I turned off the tv & spent an evening babysitting our newborn (12-day-old) grandson. We fed him when he was awake. When he slept, we read & listened to (quiet) music.

My husband & I are iin our mid-late '50’s, so maybe we don’t fit the “technological gizmo” age. But our life has lately been improved richly.

Love, Phil

11

Couldn’t do without it:

Palm TX: I take this thing everywhere and it has just about all my personal info in it. (Encrypted, naturally). I can also surf the web via WiFi, read eBooks, listen to my MP3s, keep a diary, learn Czech vocabulary…etc, etc.

Neccessary evil: Mobile phone.
I never really caught the bug for these things. I have one for work, but I hate using it and keeping it charged up. Windows mobile OS both sucks and blows, compared to the comparatively ancient, but useful OS on the TX.

12

Photoshop with Wacom Pad

I spent 20 yrs putting together a shop/studio that I could do almost anything in (Blow glass, air brush, sculpt and fire in ceramics, paint, carve a variety of materials, electronic/electrical… you name it)

I used to work as an exhibit designer for museums, and everything from models to dinosaur skulls (reproductions) came out of that room.

THEN I got Photoshop.

I can do almost anything graphic/2d in Photoshop that I can do in my shop, faster, easier and better.

Sure its nice to have 3 Aztec airbrushes when you need em (saves effort and timechanging colours in mid stream), but I have an INFINITE number of air brushes in Photoshop.
And now for teh “MEH”

Fancy Dancy wide format high resolution home printer…

Wow… what a way to waste $600! It costs nearly $350 to refill the ink, and I get better “output” by sending my stuff off to a professional printer anyway. For the money I spent on the printer, refils and paper, I could easily get 30-50 better quality prints in any size I want from a local graphics company I use.

Regards
FML

13

**Good: **
iPod - I have two now, and couldn’t live without one. I never realized I’d use one so much, and if my two both broke today I’d immediately run out and buy a new one. I’m not a person who is really into music, but my iPod is a must have.

Digital camera - also a must have in my book. I love taking pictures.

Computers. duh.

So-so:
Cell phone - nice to have in an emergency or while traveling, but otherwise I hate it. I hate all phones. Email me instead, please.
PDA - I never really got into using mine that much. I tried to use it for keeping track of assignments and exams in school, but it was more of a hassle to enter the info that to just remember the info in my head.

14

  1. Computer. It is essential to my life. It has changed my life infinitely.

  2. Digital camera. I always loved taking pictures, but I’m inept often. I can take 50 pictures at the local park and keep the six that please me. I can almost instantly share them and preserve them.

  3. Cel phone. Very handy, of course. Even if I don’t particularily like talking on the phone, it’s good to have it with me everywhere I go. Emergencies, changes of plans, and so on. The phone’s got more features than I need–I haven’t set it up to get my email, but I can whip it out and surf the web while waiting, take notes, and listen to music. It’s amazing what’s in phones these days, and it’s not even the latest or greatest. (Nokia E62.)

  4. Going back a bit, how about a CD player? That was a huge one for me back in 1991.

But like phil417 I can entertain myself minus electricity, never mind electronics. When a winter storm takes the power out, there is a guitar to play, books to read by gas lamps and candles, I can write by hand if I feel creative, and we have playing cards and board game. I wouldn’t want to be totally dependent on electronics for all my entertainment.

I’m 43, not necessarily an early adopter–I didn’t believe my brother in 1983 when he said one day I’d have a computer, and that one day almost everyone we knew would have one. I thought he was nuts–he was right.

DVDs and a DVD player have been great for my husband, who loves movies and who will watch movies over and over. I am more inclined toward television on DVD, so I don’t worry so much about seeing something when it’s on, because I know that (with some exceptions for things I only wish were on DVD) I can pick up a whole season of something that sounds like it would appeal to me and watch it without commercials, at my convenience, or not. Right now, I’m watching Carnivale.

I am sure my husband, who watches far more TV/movies/DVDs than I do would groove on Tivo or an equivalent, but we haven’t gone that far yet, nor do we have an HDTV. We’ve actually never bought a TV; for some reason, people give us their old ones. :slight_smile:

Duds. Hm. I don’t buy every electronic gizmo out there, so there aren’t a whole lot of duds sitting around. Or else I’ve given them away so they don’t come to mind.

I thought I would use my mp3 player a lot more than I actually do, but when I walk the dog, I tend to run into people and if it’s at night, I’m not keen on blotting out the sounds of the outside world. I used to heavily, heavily use a Walkman back in the days of high school and university, but I was walking everywhere (or bussing) and usually in daytime, and without a dog to talk to.

I think the Walkman, at one point in my life, really, really improved it–the walking was not bad with music and/or the radio it had, and I got a hell of a lot more exercise without minding it so much.

15

GPS in itself isn’t much use to the average person, but combine it wit a computer with a map and you’ve got today’s route-finders and driver aids.

16

Truly Made a Positive Difference in My Life

The home computer, and internet. Duh.

Cell phones, PDA’s and, best of all, Crackberries. My “crackberry” is a TREO, but same principle. I can turn the phone off (I hate phones) until needed, it’s lighter than a Daytimer, and Bubblebreaker keeps me from choking check writers at the grocery store.

Didn’t Pan Out

GPS. For me, it’s TMI. I don’t care about the coordinates of my exact freaking location at any given moment, I just want to know if I’m still going North-ish.

MP3 player. I don’t need noise 24-7, and when I do, popping in a CD works just fine for me.

Crappy old digital cameras. Slow, bad resolution, weird colors. Used it 3 times, shoved it in a drawer for 10 years, gave it to an unfortunate child (aka my spoiled brat neighbor kid. It’ll teach him humility) a few months ago. My cell phone has a shitty camera, too. I think I used it once (vegasDopefest '07), finally retrieved some seriously funky images (ScubaBen was not orange in person, nor is LVgeogeek purple). Screw that.

Waiting to See How It Works Out

DVR. Too new (got it 3 weeks ago), still haven’t bothered to figure out how to use it. I like the concept, but we’ll see if I like it well enough to use it.

HDTV. Too new (got it 2 weeks ago), so far I don’t like a crystal clear, huge picture of the weather girl’s pancake make-up and bad skin. I’m reserving judgment until Hockey season.

Fancy new-ish digital camera. Seems okay so far, colors are reasonable, doesn’t take forever after pushing the click button, easy to transfer to the computer, however, it does blatantly point out what a craptacular photographer I really am.

17

Okay, if I can’t cite the computer:

Worked out great:

  • DVRs. I watch more TV I like in less time. I get to see exactly what I want to see and nothing else.
  • Digital cameras. I NEVER used to take pictures; getting photos developed was a hassle and you didn’t like 95% of the photos anyway. Now you can take a thousand pictures, throw out 993 bad ones with the touch of a button, and keep 7 gems. My digital camera has given me a number of photos of stunning beauty I would never have had otherwise.

Worked out okay:

  • Cell phones. E-mail is far preferable, and most of the time I NEED to call someone I can use a land line. They do add mroe convenience and a degree of safety so I count them as a positive.
  • MP3 players. I do like mine but I’m not as attached to it as I think some people are.

Not really:

  • Personal organizers (e.g. Palm Pilots.) Mobile devices with comms technology, like Blackberries, are very useful; Palm Pilots really were just functional fun. A small calendar book was a lot cheaper and just as effective.
  • HDTV. There’s a huge difference in quality. I just don’t think it matters enough to merit all the money I’d have to spend to get it. Will be a winner eventually, I guess.
  • Video game consoles. With the exception of the Wii, all are basically the same thing, all with games that are more or less alike. A lot of the games are a blast, but the system as a whole is astonishingly expensive once you start buying decent games for them. It’s much more cost effective to just buy good PC games.
18

Same here, except we don’t watch sports. We are catching up on past episodes of Star Trek and many other shows that we missed, and we get to watch them at our convenience.

The best find for me on XM has been the Comedy Channel. Starting the morning off with a couple of good, gutbusting laughs has just been wonderful.

Here we differ. My GPS has been wonderful. I am active on both geocaching.com and terracaching.com, and because of this, I have seen places that I never even knew existed.

I don’t have any of the other items on the list.

My own unique entry in the list of Really Good Things is a CPAP machine. I was diagnosed with Obstructive Sleep Apnea and my CPAP has made a world of difference in my life.

19

It’s not that new, seeing as they’ve been around since the 1970s, but I didn’t have a microwave until 1990 when my then-girlfriend and I got an apartment together. I didn’t care about getting one, figuring the stove would be fine, but said “if you really want one, we’ll get one” just to shut her up.
Three years later we break up, she moves out and takes the microwave with her. After two days waiting forever for leftovers to warm up, I ran out and bought a replacement.
The Walkman was a big one for me in college.

Duds:
PDAs without internet or phone capability. A pad and pen is a hell of a lot lighter, works even if I forget to charge it, and I don’t need new penmanship lessons. I learned printing in Kindergarten and cursive in 3rd grade, now I gotta learn some Graffiti bullshit because the machine can’t read my normal writing?? Screw that

20

Life Improvers: Teh toobz, cel phone, PDA, wicking clothing, blood glucose meter

Coulda Done Without: GPS, TXT, 3-4-or more-bladed razors, self-timing coffee maker, tapeless answer-phone (recordings sound crappy)