Twenty most useless gadgets revealed in online survey

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Brits by a lot of crap gadgets, it seems, if the results of a recent survey by the independent review site Reevoo is anything to go by.

The worst product of all time is the electric nail file — something I’ve never had cause to use — which is supposed to offer professional results but seemingly doesn’t.

Laser-guided scissors are rubbish because the laser is attached to the scissors (I suppose it would be) so is no good for those with shaky hands.

When is a candle not a candle? When it’s a pathetic electric candle, apparently, which came in at third place. Honestly, who doesn’t love real candles and the genuine risk of burning your house down?…

Survey: HD DVD is dead, but did anyone tell the online retailers?

With the HD DVD Promotional Group dissolving, Toshiba abandoning ship, and precious few studios releasing anything on the format any more, you’d have to be totally uninformed and just a little bit stupid to buy an HD DVD player thinking that it was the future.

Enter two fairly benign entities — online retailers and the Great British consumer — which when mixed can be deadly (or at least, good for making expensive mistakes)

Still, surely we can rely on our helpful, informative, reliable, up-to-date online retailers to ensure that visitors to their web site don’t make a stupid purchase they’ll regret as soon as it leaves its cardboard and polystyrene womb?

You’d think…

Here’s a roundup of some key (and not so key) Internet stores, and their current attitude towards HD DVD…

We Brits are a bunch of pirates… illegal downloaders, that is

dvd.jpgWith the Government planning to get tough on people who illegally download content from the Internet, a lot of Brits could be in trouble according to a recent survey by MoneySupermarket.com.

Nearly one in five have admitted to downloading illegally from the Internet, while nearly half say they’ve bought illegal discs, and two in ten have offered someone else a pirate disc.

12% of those surveyed were confused as to what exactly constitutes piracy.

Microsoft's innocence: teens won't download illegally if they know the law

home_taping_is_killing_music_logo.gifHats off to Microsoft for believing in teenagers. They’re not a bad bunch after all, are they?

Far be it from me to tarnish “all teenagers” with the same stereotypes, but I still had to laugh a little at the results of Microsoft’s latest survey, which suggests that teens wouldn’t download stuff illegally off the Net if they really knew what the laws were.

Nearly half of the seventh-to-tenth graders said that they weren’t familiar with the rules and guidelines for downloading images, literature, music, movies and software from the Internet.

Brits still like music CDs despite rise in Internet downloads

cd_rack.jpgWe’re still an nation who likes our CD collections, according to recent figures from the British Phonographic Industry.

Despite the rise in popularity of music downloading (both legal and not), nearly half of the people recently surveyed by PlusNet said that they thought it would be at least ten years until the CD becomes obsolete, with one n ten saying that the format would never die.