Blu-ray vs. every other consumer technology (2010) - Page 6

So I finally got around to picking up a Samsung BR player with internet/Netflix.

Holy God. That has to be the single worst set-up/UI experience I've ever had in my life. They should be deeply, deeply ashamed to have shipped such an utter clusterfuck of a hack of an abortion of an "internet experience."

Now that it's up and running it's only mildly blind-rage inducing, in that it routinely forgets its internet settings, decides it can't see the Airport Express all of 10' away, or just mysteriously blanks out when I change inputs.

But the set-up! Where to begin? The completely different data entry scheme for each and every instance where text or numbers are required? The utterly uninformative "user manual"? The near impossible task of even getting it to work with an Apple wireless access point? The different and conflicting menu designs? Wait, I know, the crown jewel: on the ugly internet services screen, there are awkwardly placed icons for Netflix, Pandora, whatever "Samsung@TV" is supposed to be, etc. There's also a very large panel that says "Samsung Internet!" with a picture of cables and apps flying off a screen. You can navigate to it. It gets a blue border when selected, just like, say, the Netflix icon. And when you select it you get a bigger version of the graphic. That's all. Dead end. Really Samsung? You thought that was reasonable? Nobody pointed out that this is pretty much a slap in the face to your customers, a frank admission that you really don't give a shit?

Clearly, the Samsung internet services people got a few square inches of circuit board space and made their interface far, far away from where the Blu-Ray people work. They literally have nothing to do with each other.

I've given Ireland shit for holding out for an Apple branded TV, but this thing makes me long for one.

Oh yeah, and I picked this up cheap, open box at Best Buy (gee, I wonder why they have so many of them?), and it turned out to have the prior owner/victim's Netflix account still on it. How do you delete that and input your own? You wouldn't guess in a million years, and god knows the manual has nothing to say on the topic. Took a call to Netflix, whose brisk efficiency on this count made it sound like they field 1000 calls a day on just that topic. So you navigate to a particular screen and press "Info" on the BR remote. And that brings up the account delete screen. (Begins to cry blood).

Compared to what Samsung's done it's the freaking ceiling of the Cistine Chapel.

But software doesn't get better over time just magically, as a matter of course, like the increases in CPU speed or memory. It has to be something a given company thinks is really valuable and important. I would say the Samsung design suggests that those values are not extant at that company. That they see hardware/software/functionality as a collection of parts and features, as stipulated by engineering and marketing people, and that there's no reason on earth to think that they'll make ever make it "better", but rather that they'll just keep sticking more shit in there in response to what they imagine to be competitive pressure.

And I would say even if Samsung took a mind to improving things, that a good quality, integrated UI experience definitely doesn't just get bolted on at some point when a manufacturer gets around to it. They would have to think in terms of platforms, and what they have with this internet stuff is about as far from a platform as it's possible to be.

I think that's why so many manufacturers are swallowing their pride and just going the full Android: they have no idea whatsoever as to how to put together a cohesive experience across devices in such a way as to not cause their customers to just throw up their hands and give up. Pretty obviously analogous to all those "smart phones" pre-iPhone that we kept hearing were way more power than anything from Apple and had had that power for years, so what was the big deal about the iPhone anyway? Which conveniently left out the fact that almost no one used almost any of those features, because they were so horribly implemented.

I'm willing to be that relatively few of the Samsung internet enabled Blu-Ray players are actually accessing the internet (remember, there were a dozen or so open box returns on my local Best Buy shelves). And claiming that people are getting more tech savvy so that hideously ill-designed, tear-off-you-face stupid nonsense is acceptable is insulting.