Top 10 worst products ever

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Posted on 12 Mar 2010 at 14:22

Despite all the money companies spend on research and development, they still manage to trundle out some absolute junk. There are thousands of bad products out there, but here's the ten worst that we've encountered in all of our years of reviewing products.

10. Gear4 PocketParty
Smack bang in that period where every other product was an iPod add-on, Gear4 decided to release the worst one we'd ever seen. The product is basically a set of stereo speakers that plug into an iPod, so you can share your music with your friends.

Well, that's the idea. In practice the PocketParty is stunningly awful. Still, even its true awfulness didn't stop Gear4 from releasing a sequel, the PocketParty V2. This was no improvement. It had a volume switch with two positions: Plus distorted music unless you selected the iPod's Bass Reducer EQ setting; Minus was so quiet as to make it almost inaudible.

In fact, you'd probably get better sound by balancing the iPod bud earphones between your teeth and using your mouth to amplify the sound. Insultingly, the PocketParty also cost £22.

9. Lindows
The hype was palpable surrounding Lindows: it was going to be a Linux operating system that provided full compatibility with Windows. Microsoft didn't take kindly to this and even sued, unsuccessfully, saying that Lindows was infringing its Windows copyright. The court case just added to the excitement.

Sadly, the final product couldn't match the hype and the only Lindows PC we ever saw was made by Evesham - the E-scape Li. Running the operating system it became painfully obvious that there was no connection with Windows at all and the promise of being able to run tons of Windows applications was not exactly true: Lindows just shipped with the WiNE Windows emulator which, back in 2002, didn't work particularly well.

In fact, the only Windows applications (known as bridging applications in the Lindows world) that would work with the OS were the programs in Microsoft's Office 2000 suite. This, of course, wasn't even provided with any Lindows computers.

A change in name to Linspire didn't inspire the OS to huge sales and better Linux operating systems, such as Ubuntu, which didn't pretend to be anything other than Linux, triumphed instead.