Sony: Barfing Up Pointless Products While Spiraling the Bowl
Today, Sony announced the HDMS-S1D “Digital Photo Album”. A standalone box that can read from various flash cards, has an internal 80GB drive for buffering photos, a CD/DVD burner and can play “professional quality” slide shows (whatever that means).
A pretend question/answer session:
Q: Can it play audio?
A: Yes — it comes with 30 pre-loaded tracks that can be used as sountracks for slideshows.
Q: No, can it play my music?
A: You can load up 5 songs from your own CDs!
Q: Uh… No. Can it play any of the 16,796 tracks I have ripped from my CDs (which are buried in the garage) or purchased from iTunes or AmazonMP3?
A: No.
Q: OK — spiffy network port. Can it play or stream video?
A: No.
Q: Mmmm-kay. Can I publish my photos to Flickr or, even, some Sony’s own proprietary Sony ImageStation site?
A: No… but you can burn photos to CD, DVD, or write them to Flash media!
…btw: we shut ImageStation months ago and will take it offline by February ‘08…
Q: Let me rephrase– Can I share photos of my son’s birthday / first concert / first lost tooth / first bike ride / big finds in the woods / first day of school with family that is 2,500 miles away in less than 3 days without paying an arm or a leg for shipping?
A: Well… You could buy them a plane ticket and get them into your living room faster.
Q: Right — I’ll count that as “No”. Now, the slide show does look really good. Totally dig the face recognition. Given the rest of the features and assuming I hadn’t already solved this problem, I’d pay $100 for such a device. Sound about right?
A: No. That’ll be $400, pleeze. Kthxbai.
What the hell is Sony smoking?
An Apple TV runs $300 and does a boatload more than this thing, save for “professional quality slide shows”.
Whatever that means — I find the Apple TV’s slide shows to be totally pleasant. Love it and our party guests totally dig that we always have a great soundtrack that fits with the party culled from our own music library without repeats with an awesome slide show. 35 tracks; 30 of which are mostly crap that you can’t stand more than once, if at all?
Sure, the Apple TV requires a computer, but how many digital camera owners don’t have a computer? Hell, how many people have an HDTV and enough money to throw at a $400 slide-show box that don’t have a computer (and don’t already have a bunch of photos on said computer)?
While the HDMS-S1D looks like a nice bit of hardware engineering, it seems that the design completely failed to answer “who is the customer and do they actually exist?”
Looking at the media limitations, it seems that the box may have been designed to simply not piss off the owners of various bits of content, including Sony’s other business units. This has been a common theme in the past 15 years of Sony’s gradual demise — brilliant product potential completely hamstrung to avoid ‘competing’ with other Sony business interests.
Sad. Sony once built amazing products as a rule. Now it is an exception; great TVs and what else? Not sure.
Update: Coincidentally, Sony just sent me a reminder that the Sony ImageStation site is closing in November.
On November 12th the ImageStation® online photo service will no longer accept new photo and video uploads, support sharing or the ability to buy prints and photo gifts. The disabling of these site features represents the first phase of our planned site closure scheduled for February 1st, 2008.
Because, like, none of those features might be desirable in a box that eats photos or anything….
October 20th, 2007 at 12:12 am
I suspect the Sony product is intended for commercial markets, for use as part of advertising kiosks, or something. The kind of high-def LCD slideshow you might see in a storefront window, marketing luxury condos in a development under construction.
They certainly didn’t spend much time on devising a consumer-friendly name for the thing. And that kind of market might be perfectly okay with some kind of preloaded calculatedly non-offensive soundtrack.
October 20th, 2007 at 1:08 am
If the product was being positioned as a kiosk kind of thing, I could believe they actually thought about “a market”.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case. All of the press photos I could find showed families or small parties gathered around the HD TV in a living room sharing fruity cocktails and appetizers.
As a Kiosk device — as an unattended slideshow in the front of your store — why would it go to such great lengths to emphasize [really sub-par] sharing features?
This is a product without a market. A cool box — definitely a nice bit of hardware engineering — for which there are no buyers (or very very few anyway).
October 22nd, 2007 at 6:28 pm
Definitely sounds pretty useless. Got a link to the original site / product description?