The Reset Button

Internet & Technology

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Over the holidays, it came to our attention that the quality of  new electronic gadgets needs a lot of work.  That's not a surprise.  Sometimes buying is just a crap shoot.

Every time you turn around, we get instructions to reset something.

Have you ever had an interruption of service on your modem and called the service number?  Many times you'll get advice that goes something like this:

• Turn the power off for 30 seconds and power on again and see if it corrects the problem.
• Stick a paper clip into the tiny hole that you see on the back of the device and wait 10 seconds.  How many lights do you see?
• etc, etc....

A friend received a much hyped small camera for Christmas.  It had good reviews on that bastion of truth YouTube and had a lot of nice features.

Well, it worked for about fifteen minutes and then failed hard.  It would not do anything and would not charge.

Consulting the manufacturers web site yielded two methods of reset for the device and neither worked.

As a final piece of advice, the manufacturer advised that you were out of luck if you were trying to recharge the camera on a MAC.  The MAC's USB ports are not powerful enough.

In the case of this camera, the owner was not using a MAC.

After looking on the service web site of the manufacturer, it was clear that complete failure of the device was not a new problem.  It was an epidemic.  Looking further on the web, site after site had the same complaint.  The symptoms were much the same....

• Camera freezes reset works, but is needed all the time.
• Camera freezes and will not recharge and the user had to toss it away.  Reset does not work.

Using the service part of the manufacturers web site yielded the same advice over and over again in a long trail of emails.   Put in a request for service and you get the same advice.  The buyer trying to explain the problem and service responding with the same cure in a form email --- reset, get off the MAC.  Clearly they did not read the customers emails and the 888 number was dead.

What in the heck is going on here?

It's really a combination of things.  With this camera they have come out with ever smaller models that now 'don't need battery change', just a USB charge.  That is, you can't replace the battery.  The battery on some of these just does not work and conks out in the first hour or so, but the reset is different.

Why the heck does the device need a reset all the time?  One user complained that it happened right in the middle of using it for some sports event ruining the key shots.

Instead of having a single reset procedure to 'wake up' the camera, they had two!  One needed 5 seconds per their advice and the other 10.  Such nonsense!  Hold down a button for 5 seconds or use a tiny pin in the tripod mount hole.

The web site further cautions the owner of the lemons not to push the buttons so hard!  That is, do a reset and then resist pushing anything hard the next time it freezes.  (Control thy temper)

Much of this type of failure is due to bad engineering/programming and lack of debugging certain sequences of user actions.

All these little devices are run by tiny microprocessors that need to be programmed to pay attention to button pushes and also many different types of power on/off sequences.  This particular model suffers systemic problems that may overpower the company.  They made their reputation with a larger model with batteries and succumbed to the siren of smaller size and non-replaceable batteries.  Just for good measure they tossed in other failures.

They will have to stop shipment soon on these cameras and face the facts.   A sure sign that something is wrong is this over and over again mantra of reset, avoid the MAC and recharge overnight no matter that the customer has done all that and it's still kaput.

Reset is a way to get out of trouble.  In this case it does not work or is required along with a lot of prayer.

If you are  in the market for a new gadget, the best source of information can come from the manufacturers own web site.  Sometimes you can look at the email trail of problems.

If they are clever enough to hide this, then go to Google and put in the name of the device and terms like freeze, reboot, reset and things like that.  In a poorly designed device, the users will tell you what's good and what's not as they search for solutions.

Be careful of Wikipedia and YouTube for reviews.  They are often scripted and produced by the manufacturers and made to look like they were done by independent sources and happy customers.

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Thursday, January 07, 2010