Consumer
News
by
the Tech-edge E-zine staff 1/21/03
2002's Annual Buyers Good, Bad and the Ugly of the Tech World
Home
networking
Best to Good – D-link, Linksys,
Agere ORiNOCO, Netgear
Worst to even Worse – SMC*, Siemens*, Hawkins**,
Gigafast**
*Complaints of extremely long phone tech support on-holds and poor
product knowledge. **High failure rates, poor tech support.
PDA’s
Best to Good – Sony Clie, Palm, Handspring, HP
Jornada, Blackberry
Worst to even Worse – (Pocket PC OS)* Compaq
iPaq, Casio, Toshiba (e740)**
*Frequent crashes, clumbsy Operating System, poor GUI. **Toshiba’s
e740 has a complaint list that is too long to list here, however top
of the list is horrible battery life, the 100% recall and frequent reset
necessity.
Digital
Camera’s (consumer)
Best to Good – Olympus, Canon, Nikon, Minolta
OK to Worse – Sony, FujiFilm, Epson, Kodak, HP,
Konica, Samsung, Vivitar, Off-brands.
Online
Retailers
Best to Good – Amazon, Computers4Sure
(Office Depot), Apple Store, CDW, PC/Mac Connection, MicroWarehouse,
Provantage, Buy.com, Dell
Worst to even Worse – eCost, TigerDirect, A2Z,
Costco, Outpost.com, MP Superstore, BestBuy, Overstock.com, Abe's of
Maine Cameras.
Brick
and Mortar Retailers
Best to Good – CompUSA, Apple
Store, Gateway, Fry’s*, Costco, Micro Center
Worst to even Worse – Fry’s**, PC Club***,
Sears, BestBuy****
*Fry’s does have great prices when it’s on sales, large
on shelf inventory. **Returned products on the shelves at full price,
no purchase help unless it’s a commissioned sale, abusively long
product return lines. ***PC Club is notorious for having very little or
no “name brand product” on the store shelves, sale items frequently
out of stock. ****BestBuy for charging customers a restocking fee in returned
products.
ISP’s
Best – RoadRunner (Broadband), Optimum Online,
Local ISP’s (Dialup),
Worst – AOL, Compuserve, MSN, Juno/NetZero, Earthlink,
JOI/Hawk Communications, CyberHotLine, People PC, Syracuse Net.
All are terrible at frequent user disconnects while actively surfing,
complaints of slow connections, and JOI/Hawk disconnected it’s users
for “excessive use” despite their ads offering “Unlimited
Service”
Site
Hosting Services
Best – ValueWeb, Interland, Pair
Networks, Apple .Mac, Earthlink (hosting)
Worst* – Powweb, Addr.com, Dot5Hosting, etc.
This is obviously a partial list that could go one forever. *Complaints
of excessive down time not compliant with advertised stats, sparce technical
support, failures to reply to tech support inquiries by phone or emails,
rude tech support, email access problems, on and on and on.
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