A Xiaomi smartwatch. I never found any good use for its “smart” features and I had to charge the fucking thing all the time. So I ended up dropping it after a year in favor of a regular digital watch.
Pixel 3A. Constant bugs, camera would stop working or had a long delay starting up, system would randomly stop responding, constant crashes, lock screen would bug out preventing you from unlocking the phone. Dialer would bug out preventing you from answering the phone. Random reboots. Screen scratched really easily.
Phone crapped out about a month before warranty expired, wouldn’t boot any more. Luckily, it was still in warranty and they returned the full price.
I’ve read a lot of reviews before buying, and that was my expectation as well. I had a Nexus 5 before and it was a great phone.
Maybe I got a lemon that had some hardware fault, I don’t know. I’ve been wanting to get a newer Pixel just for GrapheneOS, but that experience was so bad, I’m having a lot of doubts
I had to buy a Clicker for college in a day when any number of phone apps, or even the Smart board, would have done exactly the same thing. I think it cost about $150 and the only thing it did – THE ONLY THING IT DID – was serve as an expensive and drastically crippled version of Kahoot. Abject waste of money for all parties involved.
I was coming to post the same. Those fucking clickers were so stupid and overpriced, all so my biochem professor could poll the class AND grade everyone on their results. Results to questions about material that was JUST taught in the same lesson. Good thing everyone benefits equally from lecture, right? Fuck that guy.
Any Bluetooth headsets on Windows 11. On Windows there are two modes for Bluetooth headsets: One with high quality audio and no microphone, one with lower quality and mic support. On Windows 10 was able to change the mode, but on Windows 11 you can’t actively change it anymore, because “the software decides” this mode. So ever few weeks my headset switch to the output only mode, get stuck, and I cannot make a call with my team mates. The workaround is time consuming and frustating.
Too bad I have to use Windows for work. Most companies do not have Linux option, even for devs.
The joycons that came with the Nintendo Switch, both failed within 3 months of owning it, and might as well include the entire console cause all the cheap plastic bits are falling apart.
I’d replace it with a Steam Deck, but the Switch’s biggest strength is being such a piece of junk I wouldn’t care if it gets stolen or destroyed
I’ve had my joycons for 5 years and they still work fine. Tbh I mostly use it as a handheld and probably only play about 100 hours per year, but I think the switch is pretty neat
Tablets. I’ve owned 2 so far, plus fucked around with a third, fancier one that was borrowed from someone else (in case you care: a very old Samsung one, a Xiaomi model from the late 2010s, and a new-ish Apple iPad for the borrowed one).
They suck as smartphone replacements because they are too big.
They lack button inputs, so they suck as gaming devices or as computer replacements.
You can browse the web… But if you decide to type anything, the large size plus the touchscreen keyboard make for an awkward experience (in ways that it’s not on a smaller phone)
They have lit screens, so they suck as eReaders.
They’re sorta okay as like, personal screens for watching movies or whatever, but like, at that point just use a television??
They can make sorta good drawing tablets, the ones that are pen-compatible I mean… Because I mean, yeah. But the lack of a keyboard is a bummer with how I learned to draw with my other hand on Ctrl+Z, though that’s more a muscle memory issue than anything.
In general, every tablet I used felt like a less-good verion of a dozen other devices, yanno?
Absolutely. I use my tablet almost exclusively as a media device but I do feel it could be so much more. It is nice though to use it while my phone is charging overnight and not wasting battery on the phone while traveling.
In my case it’s more that I get car/airsick very easily – So when I’m out and about, I won’t be watching media on a portable screen. At most listening to music or an audio-book.
And if I’m in like. A hotel. Most of them (at least here in my country) have SmartTVs that will accept broadcasting from my phone. :P
As for note-taking, I can see the appeal but refer to my comment about typing in a Tablet being uniquely awful.
One of the funniest memories from when I was travelling (around 2017) was many tourists holding up their giant tablet devices, fumbling with them to try take photos of things.
See, I thought it might have been my tablets being cheap things.
But messing around with that borrowed iPad (possibly a Pro, the person who lent me it was filthy rich and likes premium stuff) made me go “… This is like, a high quality laptop but worse in every way?”
The screen was drop-dead gorgeous, and it was clearly a powerful (if locked down, cuz Apple) device – but it felt like everything I tried to do on the device was in some major way a compromise to accomodate for a less-than-ideal form factor.
Same. I used to make fun of them as they’re ‘too big’ for mobile stuff but too small for computer stuff, but after getting a killer deal on a Tab S7+, it’s super useful for casual games, watching youtube/plex, drawing, and web browsing. It’s also great to use in the kitchen while cooking or doing other stuff
Amazon Fire Tablet 7in. I bought it literally just to read PDFs, and it was so slow that it was basically unusable. I tried switching out the launcher to something more minimal (Niagara launcher I think), and I figured out how to disable the ads that were all over the place. It helped a bit, but not enough to overcome the hardware and Fire OS. (I think I needed ADB for both of those fixes; I had to put in some real work to unfuck that tablet.) Plus the screen was too small for my pathetic human eyeballs.
Was it worth $30? At the time, yeah, because I literally couldn’t afford anything else, but I now have an $80 10in generic Android tablet that’s wildly faster.
Have to add, I came across mine the other day in a drawer and the soft touch finish is sticky now, and the thing was so bad to begin with I feel like it’s that way on purpose just to be a dick.
They are pieces of shit but for the price it’s actually pretty decent. $30 is the price of a couple McDonalds meals. We used to buy them for the kid to use since it didn’t really matter if it got destroyed. I also bought a new one to use as a smart home touch interface but I haven’t quite finished that due to ADHD and too many projects.
It was an Android tablet circa 2011, right at that time they were actually making 10" Android tablets. I bought one as soon as Android Honeycomb launched which had an improved UI and lot of new tablet focused features. I bought the optional keyboard/battery attachment and planned for it to be my tiny laptop replacement that could also play emulators and be used for reading comics. I wanted to like it so bad.
It never really panned out though, a large majority of which was because of the faulty Nvidia Tegra 3 chip. Awful performance issues, terrible wireless connectivity, overheating, battery drain and nonexistant software updates from Asus. I ran custom ROMs trying to squeeze it as much as I could but that meant I was constantly tinkering with it and having yet more problems. Eventually I even broke the screen (my fault) and painstakingly went through a whole botched screen replacement before finally deciding that it had been a huge waste of time and money and sent it to it’s grave.
I went from a cheap mp3 player that I could just plug in to my computer and drag in music to an iPod which forced me to download the iTunes bloatware create an account and then took 100x longer to transfer music because of the pointless conversion each file had to undergo. This was my first and last experience with a personal Apple device. Ended up putting some old pop music onto it and giving it to my grandmother after 2 days. Uninstalled iTunes and went back to using my cheap mp3 player until I replaced it with a smartphone.
Coming in as a close second place, an all-in-one Sony Vaoi computer that cost a fortune and had shit performance. Took daily nags to Sony before they took it back and gave me a refund. I find that Sony’s hit and miss though. My favourite smartphone (Xperia Play) was Sony, and I love my Sony Bluetooth earbuds. The Sony Smartwatch was shit.
Fuck the surface pro 3, you’ll never get another cent from me Microsoft you fucking cunts! ( Except for halo mcc and infinite BUT NO MORE (unless the next halo is actually good but even the ONLY ON SALE))
Oh man, I loved my Surface Pro 3. I used it as my main device for home and work for years. Not invalidating your experience… I’ve used devices that others thought were great that I thought were garbage.
Funny thing is i just installed linux on it and was able to get some more life out of it as a monitor on my exercise bike. Microsoft just immediately threw in the towel on it and told me to buy another one 🤣
It just kept dying. Typing a Word document one moment, black screen the next. I bought this thing in August because I was going back to school and I needed a new laptop. By December I finally convinced them to replace the machine outright. I got a different model that lacked a lot of the features I had ordered.
When I was a child in the 90s I somehow scored a voice role in a hotdog commercial for the radio. I was paid a king’s ransom for this, half of which my parents made me put in savings (wise), and half of which I spent on a brand new Sega CD (not wise).
The magic of postage stamp-sized full motion video took about three days to wear off, at which point all that was left was basically pure shit. They jacked me. At least I learned that lesson early.
You know what’s funny? Nintendo put expansion slots on the bottom of all of their consoles prior to the Wii. In Japan, they were used for the Famicom Disk System, the Satellaview, the N64DD and the Gameboy Player. The latter was the only one that made it to the West. They never released an expansion for a console outside of Asia. They even had to retool several games that were released on Famicom diskettes for cartridges in the West, including inventing on-cartridge save files via battery-backed RAM for The Legend of Zelda in order to release them in the West.
Given Sega’s track record with console expansions, Nintendo might have been just as well off. Well, except for how the SNES optical drive add-on played out.
More directly. The playstation was developed as an expansion for supernes. Then nintendo changed their mind and sony decided to keep developing it as their own device