Technologies I Hate

PC Mag has a column titled, 12 Technologies I Hate. Here are mine.

Apple iTunes - The Apple ipods are very expensive and lacking in features compared to the competition, but the worst thing is that you have to use Apple iTunes.

Cell phone plans - They are so annoying that I use a prepaid phone. Every time I boot it up, it displays how many paid minutes I have left, when they expire, and how many missed calls I have. Not even the Apple iphone will do any of that.

Email apps - The email apps from Msft, Apple, Mozilla, etc are highly polished and feature rich, but brain-damaged. Crude web-based systems sometimes work a lot better. That is crazy. A native app should be better than a browswer-based app.

Car stereos - My car stereo died about ten years ago, and I am still waiting for one that is more convenient than my portable ipod-type music player.

Adobe Flash - I know it is needed for YouTube, but most it is just an annoyance delivering ads and bad website graphics. I hope HTML 5 soon makes it unnecessary for YouTube. I keep it turned off.

Blu-ray - Everyone cheered when this drove HD-DVD out of business, but it seems like a step backwards to me.

Bluetooth - A better technology for wireless devices is really needed.

Universal remote control - I've bought a couple of fancy ones, and I returned them because they could not recognize my devices and they were more trouble than they were worth.

Online photo prints. This should be a natural, but all of the sites are really painful. I have attempted an online order about 25 times, and succeeded only about 3 times.

Update: A reader suggests following these ATT instructions to request text messages with account info. I don't know about this. I also read stories like this about people running up huge iphone bills without their knowledge. I also read that the average iphone user pays about $3 per minute, because of billing confusion. My guess is that most iphone users do not know how to get the account info, if it even works at all.