Top 10 worst products ever

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Posted on 12 Mar 2010 at 14:22

2. Iomega HipZip
Back in 1999, flash memory was starting to become more popular and Iomega was looking for a way to replicate the success it had with the Zip drive, but for portable devices. Its solution was the Clik! Drive: a tiny 40MB disc, which Iomega said would be used in digital cameras and other portable devices.

Iomega was massively wrong on this account and even had to rebrand the Clik! as PocketZip after the infamous click of death class action lawsuit, regarding the mass failure of Zip drives. Even that didn't make the format popular, so Iomega decided the best thing to do was to create the HipZip: an MP3 player that used the PocketZip for storage.

This was one awful MP3 player: it was huge, expensive (£290), the PocketZip discs were expensive (£10) and you could only store around 30 minutes of MP3 audio on each one. By comparison, you could buy MiniDisc players for less, store 80 minutes of high-quality audio and buy each disc for around £3. It wasn't long before hard disk MP3 players and higher capacity flash-based players were released and the HipZip and the PocketZip were justly confined to history's rubbish bin.

1. Amstrad Em@iler
The idea behind the Em@iler phone was to give people without computers a system that they could use to send emails. It was also pretty cheap. That was the good news. The bad news was that it was only cheap, because using it for anything required you to dial up to a premium rate telephone number.

With emails on the original device costing 12p each to send, any kind of normal day's correspondence could soon add up to costing a fortune. Throw in the fact that you pretty much had to read the 126-page manual to make any sense of the thing and it started to come a bit of nightmare. The final insult was that the screen was used to deliver constant adverts.

Subsequent versions were launched, which let you make video calls (at a surcharge, of course, and not to anyone outside of the UK), and browse the web at super-slow speeds with a per-minute charge. Things certainly didn't get better.

At one point Sir Alan Sugar took criticism of the original Em@iler personally when he read Charles Arthur's piece in the Independent. Emailing all 95,000 Em@iler users personally, he asked them to email Charles back with enthusiastic comments. Sadly, not all of the Em@iler users agreed with Sugar.

"I agree with you about the Amstrad Em@iler this is my 3rd one in 6 months I won't be getting another one, I think they're crap," wrote one person to Arthur.

Fortunately, the Em@iler is no longer on sale and no new versions are in the works, while Sir Alan has gone on to bigger and better things: shouting at the massively incompetent job applicants in The Apprentice.

Author: Expert Reviews Staff