The yogurt makers of tech: Gadgets to avoid

Cisco's release Tuesday of the Flipshare TV brought to mind other overpriced single-purpose devices that have cluttered my computer desk and stereo rack over the years. Like the over-specific kitchen appliances you use once or only once in a while and don't really need in your life (yogurt makers, margarita mixers, hot-dog toasters), there are plenty of technological products that are better at taking up your space and money than providing ongoing value.


TV media viewers
Worst example: The Microsoft TV Photo Viewer. Released in 2001, this was a floppy disk drive with a TV output. It was for viewing digital photos on a TV. Of course, if you had a digital camera and a computer, you already had a good way to view photos, and at a better resolution than the TVs of the day. But with the TV Photo Viewer, you could set your parents up with a viewing station for your digital photos.

Great--but then you had to teach them how to use it, make sure it stayed connected to their TV, and worse, crunch your photos down to fit on a floppy and get said floppy to them so they could see the pictures. I tried to set one of these up for my mother. She rolled her eyes and said, "Just mail me the snapshots, dear."

Also in this category, the aforementioned Flipshare TV, a $149 device whose main function can be duplicated by a $0.31 HDMI cable. For that matter, the Flip camera itself is a bit of a one-trick pony. Sure, it's easy to use, but a standard digital camera will also take videos. I have a Flip camera myself and I do love it--in theory. But when I leave the house, I don't want to take a video camera that duplicates only one thing that my point-and-shoot digicam does (and without a zoom lens, no less), so the Flip stays home almost all the time.

Related: The Sandisk Take TV, which was a bunch of wires and parts that let you watch videos stored on SD cards on your TV. It was a great product for all those illegal vids you got from BitTorrent. It, like the the TV Photo Viewer, is no longer sold.