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The best gadgets are expensive, but so are plenty not-the-best ones too. And regardless of how “good” something is, its only worth as much as it does for you. The best useless machine is, well, useless.
What’s the most you’ve paid for a gadget that just didn’t cut it, either because it was overpriced, underwhelming, or just ultimately not your style? We all make mistakes, but some hurt a little more than others, especially in the wallet. But if you play on the cutting edge, you’re bound to get some nicks, right?
Image by Ryabitskaya Elena/Shutterstock
What's the Fastest You've Ever Destroyed a New Gadget?
What's the Worst Gadget You Actually Paid For?
What's the Weirdest Frankgadget You've Ever Seen?
£50 for a cheapo android tablet. it was indeed too good an offer to be true.
Archos Cobalt 80? I got one too
£300 for a sim-free Nokia 6600 when it first came out. One of the best phone’s I’ve had
The Galaxy note 1 I have now is on contract at £15.50/month so I don’t think it’s fair to use that as the cost of the phone because it includes calls and texts.
Oh, £399 for my HP Pavilion g6 with Quad core CPU and dual graphics. I get gadgets when they’re on sale so I don’t spend too much.
I also don’t get gadgets in the first 3 months upon it’s release to get the best price and the bugs ironed out. I’m not bothered having the latest and greatest so long my gadget isn’t way behind that it won’t play apps/programs I use regularly.
I splashed £400 on a Yamaha TENORI-ON.
http://europe.yamaha.com/en/products/musical-instruments/entertainment/tenori-on/tenori-on_series/?mode=series%23tab=feature#tab=feature
I replaced it with a 99p iPhone app which had more features after I sold it.
ouch. I always thought these looked freakin’ sweet. must be an awesome iPhone app, aha.
Nokia 920, tank of a phone. With that being its most striking feature you would hope that build quality wasn’t squandered upon; I had 3 replacements within one month. Not that you can hold it against the feature set, it’s a shame they balanced the devices primary features so poorly.
Don’t even get me started on the Microsoft surface, although the jailbreak with legacy support is starting to regain my faith. It’s such a shame for it to falter as they take their first steps into the vicious world of hardware.
Poorly balanced features? What am I missing out on then?
Sent from my Lumia 920 (1st one – still going strong…will probably survive a Nuclear Winter or three)
I paid £2500 for a Nikon D800 just after release, then 6 months later my missus picked one up for £1800. I don’t regret paying it for a second though, it’s worth it and more.
thats mine too!
Any printer ink, ever.
i felt better after switching to colour laser printers, i dread to think how much money i wasted on crappy nozzle clogging inkjet printers
Its true the running cost are lower for high volumes, but you dont get the quality.
i don’t need top quality, if i want photo quality i just upload them and get them printed via snapfish (or whoever i feel like using on the day)
its usually letters signs for shop, or daughters homework etc..
Ah for that, it is perfect.
About £750 for a PS3 4 months after it came out, second hand off eBay. To be fair it did come with about £300 worth of extras (games, extra controllers) but it makes me shudder now to think I spent that.
It YLOD’d on me about two years ago. I paid Sony £120 for a replacement, and that did the exact same thing (two weeks after its 3 month warranty expired).
Yeah…my next console was an Xbox…
I’m always frugal when buying gadgets, but my girlfriend is good at over paying for things she under uses.
She is using a 15inch i7 MBP with the extra non-gloss screen… just to use FireFox and Word. Even the guy at the Apple store was telling here she didn’t need it and to get something not as powerful.
To think what I could do with that laptop!
She should (hopefully) have it a long time though. You’ll have to divide it by how long it lasts to see if it was a good buy
HA. Its on its last legs already.
She bought this MBP for £1600 and I got my Dell XPS17 the same time for £1200.
I am on mine a discussing amount as I’m a web designer and she uses hers lightly (as previously explained).
And it’s already running at a snails pace.
I have now persuaded her to boot the thing with a clean OS. Sell it (before it dies) and by a Win8 machine. She has been a Mac person all her life and I have converted her!
Thats another set of wings for Bill Gates when he goes to heaven.
Well that sucks! You might find that a clean install os OS X and the restoring programs/settings/files from a time machinbe back up solves whatever’s causing the slowdown. My Core2duo MBP is still running pretty smoothly on lion.
£330 for a 3MP Canon digital camera when they first came out…. crazy that you can now get 11MP for about £100. I guess also £280 for an Archos MP4 player, but that was pretty bad ass when it first came out so was worth it.
i did buy one of the first digital vga cameras prior to any megapixel cameras being out, but i honestly cant remember how much it was
£499 for the original TomTom from staples.
I was young and naive.
Showing my age now, but before mobile phones came out there were such things as “transportable” phones basically a phone attached to a brick that you carried around with you, i bought one of the first generation Panasonic transportables, you would not believe how much i paid for the dam thing considering how long the contract was i still cant believe i was stupid enough to sign up.
possibly spending money on the Amiga CD32
done that!!
i got addicted to liberation
I paid about £300 for a Creative Zen Vision the day it came out. One of the first multimedia portable devices, it had an HDD about about 30Gb, http://www.creative.com/products/pmp/demo/zenvision.asp
It’s not that it wasn’t a great gadget – Creative’s on the fly playlist handling was always brilliant, and their sound quality much better than the competition. It’s just that it was big. And I had to transcode video into small files that got a bit blocky, and I rarely watched any video on it anyway. And having to specifically load up photos I rarely looked at was a faff.
So in short, I used it for exactly the same thing I’d used my Creative Zen 20Gb for (which is still the best mp3 player I’ve ever used), thus wasting £300.
I guess it was a bit ahead of itself. H.264 was unheard of. Flash memory devices were still about 8Gb max. Now, my phone syncs my photos itself and I have two h.264 capable devices in my pocket, together taking less than a quarter of the size of the Vision.
Don’t knock it – I purchased the 60GB and used heavily it til the day it died. I still debate resurrecting it every so often and sticking a 256GB SSD inside. Costly, perhaps, but bullet proof, definitely!
A shame it’s now just cheaper to load a 64GB microSDXC card into my phone and purchase an extra battery.
I paid £120 for Japanese import of Street Fighter II Turbo on the SNES 20 years ago!
I was 13, a huge sum of cash for me at the time!
I remember those days of having and adpater to play US or Super Famicom games on the SNES.
There were so many games that never made it the UK or took ages to arrive.
I just paid £45 for an ergonomic mouse. Considering the build feels no better than any random £10 mouse I completely fail to see how it’s worth the premium.
I paid £80 for what purported to be a 2TB solid state USB drive. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be flash memory, but I thought it’d at least be a usable 2TB drive. How wrong I was.
2 questions.
a. was it off ebay
b. Was it chinese
Actually it was off what I thought looked a reasonably reputable site. And it uses the same payment system as my university, SagePay, so I thought that would give me some protection. Gave me none whatsoever.
As for the Chinese thing… Yeah, i’m pretty sure it was. I’ve still got it somewhere back home.
Dude..
2 years ago I payed about £200 for a Sony Xperia Play. I’m sure the fact that I was stuck using a Samsung Galaxy Ace at the time had just made me desperate for a good phone and will to pay so much for one.
£600 for my Canon SLR when my point and shoot died.
I used to carry my point and shoot everywhere with me and therefore took hundreds of photos. With the SLR, due to it’s size it only ever comes out when I know i’ll be taking photos and never goes to gigs or parties.
Anyone else found this when moving to SLR’s?? Am tempted to get something like a fujifilm x100s
About £70 for the media remote for my Sony CLIÉ PEG-SJ22. I guess it was pretty rare, all it did was convert the dock connector to a 3.5mm jack (only way to get any audio out of the device other than beeps from the built in speaker) and had some playback controls.
Three come to mind.
£240 for a Sony 7.2mp camera (was on half price offer at the time)
£1200 for a Compaq Presario laptop in 1999.
£300 for a Sony Eriksson Z1010 phone on release day – the 1st 3G phone I ever had.
£110 on iRiver iFP-190TC 256MB MP3 Player – 2003 I believe.
£150 on a Motorola V100 Personal Communicator. After 2 months of use and spending a further £40 on replacement headsets I binned it and got a Nokia.
I paid about $150 US for a Sony Mylo while visiting San Francisco. It was so close to becoming ‘the social media device’ but never took off………Still have it in mint condition. Anyone wanna buy it? ill do you a good price…..
£150 for a 1GB SD card in 2002 for my Panasonic SV-SD75 which was unusable with that many songs on it.
£20 for a 512mb PNY Attaché USB stick in 2005. =/
However, it’s still working unlike other USB
£20 for a 512mb PNY Attaché USB stick in 2005. =/
Got a Wii U for £300 the week it came out. I think part of me just wanted to try it as no-one I know has bought ones and I haven’t seen any in-store examples. I don’t necessarily mind that I’ve invested early and that the price will eventually go down, but Zavvi is ALREADY selling them for £225, and I still only own Nintendoland for the system :/.
Sega Saturn on release day it was a ridiculous price and dead as soon as the PlayStation arrived.
One of the best gadgets I ever used was an original Microwriter, a solid brick of a thing with keys pressed in combination to make letters. Text was saved in the small internal memory, and it was connected to an RS232 port to upload it. The keys were very light and fingertip-sized, the mnemonics were clear, the smooth heavy shape made a very good palmrest, and I could rattle away on it anywhere I happened to be sitting. The Delete key was an easy chord to use, there was a screen showing the last four words or so, and I typed very fast, backspacing quickly over anything I got wrong.
The worst gadgets were probably all the ones I got in the years since to try to get something similar:
1) The worst of all was the Twiddler, a chord keyboard with so many options that it was pretty much impossible to type at speed on the tiny chiclet keys. It was horribly expensive, especially with tax from the US. I managed to lash it up to my Palm without breaking it — at first!–and then there was only the pain of actually using the keys to worry about.
2) The Frogpad bluetooth half-keyboard. Because it was a one-hand keyboard that had to be chorded to get the other half of the letters, and because it was more ambitious than the Microwriter, I couldn’t use it without looking, and the bluetooth wasn’t accurate enough either. By that time I wanted something where I could set my smartphone to a fresh document, stick it back in my bag and just start typing — in fact where I could add new notes whenever I thought of something and file them at the end of the day.
3) The Microwriter Agenda. This had an irritating set of chiclet half-keys underneath the Microwriter keys for no reason, and took away the large useful palmrest.
There’s no perfect answer. PDAs and smartphones are much lighter, but require actual attention for text entry and offer the perpetual distraction of other things. The original Microwriter was still the best for just hammering text in, but I’m sure I’d miss my iPhone if I tried to use something else instead now.
I paid about £50 for a 64mb (yes MEGAbyte not GIGAbyte) mp3 player (Creative Muvo) way back around 2003. I didn’t regret it at all as it was tiny and took 1 aaa battery, loved the design and everything. I even wrote a little bit of code to dump random songs onto it each day for my walk to work from my library (I invented “random Shuffle”! Apple owe me millions!). I just shake my head in disbelief now 10 years later I paid less for a 64Gb micro SD with 1000 times the storage!
Do laptops count?
I bought a 3DS on launch night and hardly ever play it.