Culture|Garage

Wireless USB is upon us. What wireless USB does is eliminate that nest of wires behind your home PC by making the connections to your printer and other devices, well, wireless.

 What Sony has done with their “Transfer Jet” device is take a dump on progress while trying to corner their customers into buying only Sony’s incompatible, competing standard.

While other WUSB devices have a range of 30 feet, Sony’s standard has a range of 3 centimeters. Weaksauce.

Sure a lot of Sony’s products are cool, and innovative. What bothers me is when they release products just to be different and to make consumers basically invest in all of their products.  That’s pretty lame.

Let’s examine some more past Sony products after the jump.

Here are some awesome Sony innoventions of the past.

Not all of these are bad, mind you. Some may just have suffered from bad marketing or been hindered by poor support. Some just plain suck.

1. Oh no, Beta.

Betamax offered greater video quality but an initial tape time of only one hour, which hindered it. Sony realised the Betamax might be in trouble when JVC decided to make their own technology instead of taking Sony’s offer to produce it. By 1988, Beta was gone when Sony started to make VCRs.

I don’t even know anyone who had Beta when I was growing up. It was VCRs all the way.

2. Minidisc.

Introduced in 1993, Minidisc isn’t really a bad product, it just never caught on in America. It was skip free, small, and you could record on it. But it was expensive and there were very little pre-recorded albums available. Oh, it also introduced ATRAC, Sony’s proprietary audio compression…suckage.

RIP minidisc, we hardly knew ye.

3. ATRAC.

Everyone knows what MP3 is, right? Sony needed its own compression standard. Enter ATRAC. I can’t even really explain what Sony was trying here.

All I know is that Sony digital audio players used ATRAC up to 2004, (you had to use Sony’s software to convert ATRAC to MP3s if you wanted to listen to them) and in August 2007 Sony announced that its online music store would no longer support the ATRAC audio format. Abandon the consumer. Thanks.

4. Universal Media Disc.

 Uhhh. Where do I start? This small CD like disc, for use on the Playstation Portable, is used for games, movies, and TV shows. On the first gen PSP, you couldn’t even get it to output to a TV to watch your UMD movies that are $15-20 a pop.

The new PSP does allow this (at a resolution of 480p) but you have to buy a special Sony cable. (Surprised?) Did I mention DVD extras are deleted from UMD movies due to storage space? Gimme a break!

High prices and studios backing out at a very fast rate makes the future look bleak for UMD.

5. Memory Stick.

Blerg. This one really annoys me, being a user of digital cameras. Flash memory that can only be used in Sony products. Great. Sorry, I’d rather use SD because it fits in any card reader and my laptop also has an SD slot.

This being a tech article, I’m sure there are glaring errors, or maybe I just didn’t make sense.

Shoot me an email at pat@culturegarage.com and tell me what I did wrong -or give me a story idea. I’d like that. Just don’t send me any ATRAC files.

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