According to Pegoraro at Washingtonpost, It's pretty much all negativity, explaining why five kinds of gadgets aren't worth your money this holiday season: Blu-ray high-definition players, XM and Sirius satellite radio receivers, set-top Internet video boxes, phones running Google's Android software and e-book readers like Amazon's Kindle.
My inbox has yet to fill up with "how could you?!" or "Ugh" e-mails from publicists for the companies that make these things, but I'm pretty sure those messages are being composed as I write this.
I understand why they might feel a little blindsided -- I've said complimentary things about all of these things in the past. See, for example, my assessments of such Internet video receivers as Apple's Apple TV and Roku's Netflix Player; T-Mobile's G1 Android phone; and Amazon's Kindle.
(Then again, I've long been a Blu-ray skeptic, and I thought the Sirius-XM merger was a dumb idea from the start.)
If you ask me about these five gadgets again in late 2009, I might be far more optimistic about them -- almost all of their failings are not the result of any technological limits, but business decisions made by companies who could do better. Android phones, for example, should be a much better choice once more than one carrier and manufacturer offer them. On the other hand, companies can be awfully stubborn about admitting they've made a mistake (Apple comes to mind in particular). So I'm really not sure. How about you? How do you think these five gadgets will be doing a year from now?
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