Where Technology Fails

Last night, I wanted to play my wife a single track from a Lily Allen album. It was pertinent to what we had been watching on TV. I could have found the CD, fired up the CD Player and Receiver and played it, but I thought I'd save time and use technology. So, I fired up my Linksys DMA2200, it's a solid-state Windows Media Extender that sits in the living room linked up to the TV and went on to completely fail to play the track I wanted. This is exactly why technology so often fails in the home and why people will continue to be content to use a radio or their old CD player rather then modern equivalents that offer so much more.

So, I powered up the DMA2200, but then realised my PC upstairs was off. The DMA2200 needed to communicate with my PC to access the files so I had to go and boot it up (5mins wait). Then the DMA2200 connected and the main interface showed up (another 2-3mins wait). I navigated to the music part (sluggishly, but this is normal). It told me I had no playlists, and then refused to navigate to the albums themselves (10mins fiddling trying to sort it out). It's not done this before. I checked the connection, I navigated (sluggishly again) to the videos section, they played just fine (10mins watching some home videos). Back to the music, nothing, nada, no luck. Rebooted, tried again, nothing. More than half an hour after starting, I gave up.

It's played music just fine before, now it seems to be refusing to do so. I have no idea why and I'm relatively technical. I bought a solid state device to save electricity not use more. It can't play ripped DVDs like Windows Media Centre on my PC can, instead you have to wrap the actual film file in a proprietory format to make it play (I found that out via an internet search). It responds sluggishly and takes a reasonable expert to set up. What I find really annoying is that it's not even the first generation of this kind of equipment, I had a Kiss 1500 for a few years and got used to the eccentricities of that one (it only played files of less than 1Gb, but at least it would play files from a server) so I expected the next generation to be able to deliver what the customer wanted, but no, not a bit of it.

This is symptomatic of home-based technology and it's time the suppliers sorted things out. How many wireless routers have a way of enabling people to set up a secure wireless LAN without having previous knowledge of how to do it? How many devices actually support all the formats that we really need? How many interface with each other seamlessly and effortlessly? Probably none. Interestingly, the digital TV set-top-box systems from Sky or Virgin Media are probably the only modern-day computerised device that actually work properly in the home that can be used by non-technophiles. If only more systems emulated the digital TV set-top-box system perhaps more devices would get mass market penetration, but they need an interface that just works and provids all that the customer needed at a touch of a button first.

In the meantime, perhaps I'll go back to the CD-player, it's just so much quicker...