By Richard M. Sherwin

After reading Consumer Reports and CNET and many of the leading consumer product rating services, there are so many things that these fine agencies miss when analyzing a TV or PC or Tablet or software that Digital Family Advisor decided to list some of the negative feedback that these award winning products receive from our readers, listeners and viewers. In no particular order:

• TiVo, after a nice remake and redesign of its top of the line digital video recorders, is still fraught with latency in choosing to record a TV show making it a slower task than even the ten year old TiVo’s because it relies on the “Cloud” to store consumers’ choices rather than the hard drive.
• Sony’s almost unanimously top rated Sound Bar, and Bose’s too, still require a weight lifter to handle the giant subwoofer.  And while those subwoofers are now wireless and can be hidden in a closet they still take up too much room, even though every other technology breakthrough has resulted in smaller, thinner lighter size products.
• While the best audio receivers can produce high quality music in slimmer packages, Yamaha, Denon, Sony, Marantz, Onkyo and Pioneer are all still lacking in the same key consumer experience. They are still hard to use and have difficult to understand control settings for the average consumer.  None have made the transition that their video counterparts have made: Easy to see easy to manipulate controls. It’s almost as though being sophisticated has to mean hard to understand.
• The top selling Apple IPad, with all of its user friendly simplicity, still has no easy to way to transfer pictures, and videos and documents from your Mac or PC to the IPad without purchasing a tricky to use adapter.
• On the other side of the Tablet world, now that Android in total outsells Apple operating systems in smart phones and Tablets, you would think that Google could have devised a way to simply save an email or attachment quickly and efficiently or perhaps one of the leading Tablet manufacturers like Samsung, Asus, Google itself or even Sony could make their own Tablet Apps to simplify the process of saving email.
• Since most of us still need a computer for our business or personal life, it’s a darn shame that even the finest PCs or Macs still take too long to boot up and now require even more confusing ties to the Cloud to start to use.
• And after 30 years you would think Microsoft could make its Office Suite or its Cloud based products easy and simply to use.
• So nearly 80% of consumers now buy Smart Phones or upgrade to the newest feature laden phone spending big bucks for their monthly service charges. Yet nearly 65% of the wonderful features available on these devices are not used by consumers, and that’s a shame. I’m sure many scientists and technology marketing executives spent hours, months even years adding these features but they haven’t gotten the message though to consumers just how smart their smart phones are. Our research shows that many consumers don’t realize that these phones can be operated by voice…or that backing up your valuable data can be done with one push of a button….or that you can transmit photos, videos and digital music to your TV or PC wirelessly… and many other features. So all in all, despite their phenomenal growth, Smart Phones are the most under used device in modern technology.
• And the service providers? Don’t you think that AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile should make their customer support people as smart as the phones?
• Televisions are still the most used consumer entertainment product in the home. If a family wants to spend more to get a better picture or larger screen, do they have to get an Internet enabled TV? Apparently. No major TV maker produces a top of the line model without bundling in a few hundred dollars’ worth of Apps and Internet related accessories that people may not need or want.