Great hardware, lousy software
359520
I originally purchased the Navman 3450 add-on for my PDA, and it crashed continuously, so I ended up returning it.  However, I desperately wanted a GPS because I got used to using on in a Jeep Grand Cherokee and take road trips often.  So, I bought this unit through Outpost for $349. (thanks previous reviewer!)  Amazon is almost always cheaper, but not on this...

So, the hardware is well designed.  The screen is great in low ambient light, good in moderate light, but unreadable in direct sunlight.  In most situations, I can see the display well and the software lets you change the color scheme, which helps somewhat with the direct sunlight problem.

The controls are sensitive, which can be annoying at times, but the unit is solidly built and the touch screen is aligned well right out of the box.  The stylus can be difficult to remove at times, but the button controls can get you most of what you need.

Now for the software...

This navigation software is so outdated that I cannot believe that they are actually shipping it.  The unit sometimes shows me driving in the grass a couple hundred feet NEXT to the road that I am on, or only shows part of an exit ramp and a gap to the road, where it gets lost and starts trying to recalculate route (which eats the battery life.)

The software is much more solid than the PDA add-on that I had tried, but has crashed once in the 2 weeks that I have had it.  The biggest problem with this is that you have to hard reboot it and cannot get GPS satelite lock until you stop on the side of the road.  So, you can either do without GPS for the rest of your trip upon software crash or you can pull over to the side of the interstate and wait a couple minutes and then try to merge back into speeding traffic.

It can be a real pain in the butt to find an address.  For example, we wanted to find an Ikea store in Baltimore.  So, you go to choose the city.  Okay, Baltimore has 12 (or 13, can't remember exactly) districts.  You have to type in the name of what you want up to the 12 (or 13) times each time you enter what you want.  So, search for the store in district 1- not found.  Okay, now you have to re-enter (why!?!!?) the name of the place and try the second district.  Not there, then repeat with each district until you either get frustrated and quit or actually find what you want.  This is the situation with the smaller cities too- you have to play the guessing game with districts.

The GPS accuracy is good (but the poor software negates the positivity of this aspect.)  I give the hardware 5 stars and the software 1 star, so overall this unit gets 3 stars.  To give you a reference point, the GPS systems in cars are more expensive and have advanced hardware that ties into inertial sensors and the speedometer as well as magnetic compasses (versus GPS compases), which greatly increase accuracy and allow 'dead reckoning' when a satellite signal is briefly unavailable.  So, you have to expect a little less from a portable unit based upon physics and hardware limitations.  I do believe that this unit would benefit from an internal magnetic compass, though.

I haven't decided whether to return this unit or not.  It flawlessly guided me from CT to New York City for New Years, but got confused and tried to tell me to turn around and backtrack 50 miles (adding 100 miles to my trip) when we went from NC to Maryland.  Navman will not update their antiquated software for free, and there is no guarantee that the newer version will fix any of these problems.  Be sure to buy a 512 mb or greater card, as the east coast (from florida to maine with only states that touch the coast + PA) is about 400 mb.

This unit is a great value, but if performance is more important than value to you, go with the TomTom or one of the Garmin car units such as the 300 or 500.  I will base my decision on whether or not to return this on whether I can justify coughing up a couple hundred (at least) more dollars than I have already spent.
847955
I'm building an Arduino datalogger for my motorcycle and needed to see what the signals from the various sensors looked like.

The hardware is perfect for that job--the signal frequencies from the motorcyle are low (audio range), and the voltage ranges are perfect.  That would have deserved 5 stars, except...

to avoid disappointment, understand that it's more of a project/kit than a "works out of the box" product like a plug and play USB PC printer.

The firmware that comes installed on the scope is pretty awful.  The manual is a B&W photocopy with about 6 half size pages in English.  The screen images in the manual were unreadable.

The manual tells you to upgrade the firmware, but the manufacturer's URL didn't have the files I needed.  An hour or so on the web & YouTube, I thought I had the files and the procedure I needed.  Tried to install the BenF firmware version 3.64 which had .dsu files.  Works out for the base device firmware of v3.2 or higher, you need .hex files.  Found them on the web, installed them, and the screen just flickered white when I turned it on.  Googled "white screen DS201" and found you need another .hex file [BENF_CUR.hex] that updates the BenF firmware to handle the screen resolution on this model.

The 19 page PDF instructions that come zipped with the BenF software are quite helpful.  They cover a couple of different models, so you have to keep track of which button does what on your model.

If you're a Rasberry PI or Arduino hobbyist, you're probably pretty good at finding and installing software from the web.  You can  teach yourself how to use an oscilloscope and figure out what all of the menu settings do.  So if you're in that hobby category, buy one--you'll have fun with it.

A tip--the device will show up as a USB drive when you connect it to Windows.  When you drag the .hex files (one at a time!) onto the file explorer, they are converted to a .RDY file.  When you reboot the scope, the .RDY files disappear from the file explorer.  I found that confusing and thought I'd done something wrong.  Apparently, when it writes the files to firmware, it erases the .RDY file.
4507222
Received my chrome book a few days ago.  I loved the hardware but the chrome OS  proved to be too cumbersome for me.  It works so differently from the windows environment and there seems to be much incompatibility between the chrome OS and applications I commonly use such as viber and some others.  Hardware quality is very impressive though.
585883
Great card but no dual card support, great support software
1009211
As others have noted, the hardware is beautiful.  I love the quality feel, the small screen and the jog dial is fun and functional.  However, the firmware is a real problem.  I have been a software engineer for 38 years, and I know buggy when I see it.  And this stuff is buggy big time.  It took me hours to program in the zone smart schedules, because it kept resetting or losing my configurations  .  And when I would exit and return to the online app, my.skydrop.com, it would frequently tell me my firmware was up to date, and then run me through an initial setup process during which it would make me reconfigure several of my stations.  To make matters worse, the reconfiguration screens it uses at setup are significantly different from the ones used within the application to program the zones. After going through this setup process I would have to go back in to the zone scheduling and reprogram the affected zones.  After getting the zones set up to appropriate times and skip-days.  I looked at the proposed watering schedule. The zone schedule called out 38 minutes every 2 1/2 days, but the proposed watering schedule was going to run every four days because "it is in the shade"!  If that is the case, the zone schedule should tell you that  You shouldn't have to be surprised by the actual watering schedule. Going from an expected 2.5 days to an actual 4 days would be a very unpleasant surprise!  And this is in July in the desert!  Others have mentioned the lack of wifi sensitivity in the unit.  I will second that.  My unit is near my router, and my laptop has no problem picking up wifi signal near the unit, but I was plagued by it continually losing its wifi connection.  It seemed to be worse in the evening than during the day, which is odd.  And there's no users manual.  The customer support response to that is, "it's on utube".
I have my old sprinkler controller set to water an area of grass for 36 minutes every other day, which is good.  When I programmed that zone in the skydrop, it told me it would run every 1.5 days for 31 minutes, which sounded close enough.  But the actual watering schedule was every day.  That would water my grass for a total of 62 minutes every 2 days, almost twice as much as I am watering now.  How can that be saving me water?  Customer support said I could set up a custom schedule, but I can do that with my old sprinkler controller. So I am sending this back for a refund.  I will try the Rachio; they have 516 reviews 85% are 5 stars 2% 1 star.  Skydrop has 147 63% are 5 stars 11% are 1 star.
2580532
The product itself works great, but the controller software that Unifi uses is garbage. You MUST use this software to get the product working.

First of all, it runs on Java, which is a security nightmare, and makes the program dependent on the frequent updates of a separate piece of software.
Second, it is not intuitive and requires a lot of networking know-how to resolve issues. Specifically, changing the ports the software uses requires you to manually update the system.properties document. The instructions to do so are on the Ubiquiti website, but they just updated the software and NOT the instructions. How is this not a UI option?

I will not be buying from Ubiquiti again.
1351156
The hardware is great. Software could use some updates other than that, it's a great bang for the buck!
2143485
Pros:  The software is absolutely fantastic.

Cons: The hardware leaves a little bit to be desired.

I really don't like the drive trays in this thing.

They're not universal.  So they only hold 3.5" disks and it's expected that the drives stay in place with screws and only two of them.  As a result, installing 8 drives is somewhat labor intensive.

The system as a whole doesn't appear to support 16GB DIMMS and at the recommended RAM consumption rate of 1G per TB, 4TB disks is your limit.  6TB is pushing it.  8TB will almost assuredly require you to tune the vfs.zfs.arc_max sysctl to keep the system from crashing and affect your overall performance.
4321877
Please only consider this if you are going to ditch Windows Starter and put GNU/Linux on here. It's absurdly slow with Windows 7.

However, Debian Linux works really great out of the box on here. I mostly found just Atheros Wi-Fi and Ethernet hardware (AR8132 Ethernet and AR9285 wireless) and, Intel mainboard, sound driver, graphics driver, and motherboard (N10/ICH 7 Family). And they all play nicely and work out of the box with Linux, and it even recognized the touchscreen without configuration, and the Wi-Fi works OOTB, which most Ubuntu users have. But I use Debian, which is the "hard core" version of Ubuntu, so it runs even faster, I bet.

Great little gadget. The touchscreen is precise unlike those horrible capacitive touch screens. But I also wish most manufacturers would employ capacitive + active digitizer like the X200t, X201t, X220t and the Galaxy Note, but you can't always get what you want. It's still enjoyable to use GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus and Xournal on here. And I use Florence for a virtual keyboard.

This "Netvertable" device is now Linux computer geek/enthusiast certified.
4930719
As good as their hardware is, the software is absolutely useless. On Google store, YooSee app, which is the only thing you can use to control the camera, has only a 3.4 rating for a reason. It is lower than most other apps for P2P IP camera. It freezes all the time, works for just a few seconds and then you have to force stop and restart.

What is regrettable is that the hardware is fantastic. If the software were just mediocre, I could still give it 5-star rating just on the hardware alone. But YooSee cloud is no good.

Note that many security professionals prefer controlling a network of many cameras via http or rtsp locally in order to avoid the problem of cloud access. This camera software does not allow you to do that. Since I also have a network of many cameras, I don't care so much for cloud service. If it had a good http or rtsp service, I would still recommend it.

However, nothing else works with this camera. I've used VLC which works so well with other rtsp:// camera, yet VLC crashed every single time with this. I suspect a bad bug somewhere. Also, the CMSclient software for PC is also awful. It is very slow to respond, if it responds at all.

I don't bother to return because it is cheap and not worth the time and hassle. Frankly, don't buy it until the company offers better software.

Edit to add: an acquaintance came to see my cameras as she intended to buy one. She was glad to talk to me because she also saw this on Amazon and almost bought it because of its color. She wondered why the rating was so high and found out the reason when selecting verified purchasers only. I offered her the camera but she didn't want it after seeing the demo. There are much better cameras out there for even lower price than this.
2094907
This is a fantastic piece of hardware, but the software bundled with it is rather disappointing - the download manager doesn't work as well as it should (won't download very large files, often won't show a reason why your torrent isn't downloading, etc.), it restarts the whole system whenever you change the smallest setting (e.g. you enable torrent seeding, it disables all your wireless network, reenables it after a few seconds). Also, I was unable to rename the default volume and share - it seems they have to be named "MYVOLUME1" and "MYSHARE1". Was also unable to delete files from it without enabling user-level authentication.

I'm really looking forward to installing OpenWRT on this, then it'll be a great system.
3776378
I love this TV.  Hands down it is the finest piece of audiovisual hardware I've ever owned.  The images are fantastic and fairly leap off the screen at you.  It integrated seamlessly with my Verizon FiOS TV and the universal remote did not need so much as a single command programmed although I confess that some of the commands are not exactly intuitive.  I'm sure they will become so over time.  This product would get five stars if it wasn't for the software.

I am reasonably techno-literate but by the end of the weekend I spent trying to set up the absolutely AWFUL Samsung allshare software I was ready to give up.  I have a simple network with a NAS box which stores most of my digital content.  I connected the TV to the network without a hitch and it recognized everything on the network without a problem (it even correctly identified the other STBs in the house and my Sonos system) but when I attempted to navigate to the content all I got was a "no content available on this device" message.  No "you must install allshare software to be able to view content on your TV" or any other helpful message.  There was no CD in the box and no instructions anywhere in the documents supplied with the TV (yes I checked and yes I am sure)  -it was only when I went online and looked at the 500+ page manual did I figure out that I needed to install the allshare software to be able to stream content.

Fair enough I suppose but wouldn't you THEN think that the software would be available for download from Samsung's site?  Nope.  I navigated to the model-specific webpage and chose 'downloads'  -nothing.  I searched the site.  Nothing.  I found a few helpful posts from others in my situation but the links they posted to the download sites were dead.  I finally managed to download a copy of the current version of allshare from a third party mirror site and that's where the fun began.

The allshare product SIMPLY DOES NOT WORK.  It doesn't work.  Ca ne marche pas.  No trabajar.  First off it doesn't completely install;  the installshield wizard hangs and if you terminate the process it will start up normally.  Second the UI looks as if it was written by prisoners of war and is utterly unintuitive;  there are no real 'help' screens to speak of and everything is written in insider buzzwords so figuring out how to configure the software is a challenge.  But all that aside, the product simply fails to recognize content and stream it to your TV.  I spent a very frustrating evening trying to get it to work and ultimately had to give up and download a copy of Serviio which worked right away in the first install.

I know Samsung fancy themselves as giving Apple a real run for its money.  Maybe that's true on the hardware side but the software is dreadful.  By all means buy this TV but DO NOT EVEN WASTE YOUR TIME WITH THE ALLSHARE 'SOFTWARE PRODUCT'!
1720839
I have this installed in a Dell XPS 630, which has plenty of power to run this device and play HD programming.  The hardware is great, being a dual-tuner there is a delay when switching from analog to digital, but no problem with that. Pinnacle's included software sucks some times! Their TV viewing software seems to lag considerably sometimes.  And then it will crash other times. I still haven't gotten a response from Pinnacle as to why their software slows down to a crawl sometimes, even after following all of their guidance. This is not my first experience with Pinnacle products. It seems their record is usually excellent, first-rate hardware that they match with crappy software.
2341208
The hardware on this motherboard is second to none; but unfortunately the thing is highly hindered by the massive amount of bloated software that you must install in order to get the hardware working. For instance; if you wish to install the Audio Drivers it will against your will install Sonic Radar. The Audio Drivers will constantly cause software to crash whenever you boot your system until you install Asus Suite 3. Now you have 3 separate pieces of software when you only wanted to install an Audio Driver. To make matters worse; the Asus Suite is basically a system monitoring application. If you already have something like a Corsair H100i; then you will now have software redundancy unless you wish to forfeit your ability of controlling the H100i by uninstalling Corsair Link.

Even worse, Asus Suite is not a single application but a set of stand alone applications: each with their own interface. Several of these applications want to boot up when Windows starts and will eat up your task-bar and increase boot times.

Verdict:
It is unfortunate, but the software is just a mess. Every motherboard I have ever owned has been an Asus but it is sad to say that this may be my last Asus motherboard. It is trivial to pay for high end hardware when the software required to run that hardware brings down the entire machine making it feel as if you had never upgraded your system in the first place.

**update**
The Bluetooth drivers will pop a message in the bottom right corner of the screen each time you toggle caps lock, nums lock, or scroll lock. This may either cause your game to minimize or flicker. There is no way to disable this without manually editing the registry.

**update**
The fan connectors are not PWM even though they are 4 pin.
Quoting ASUS: "Chassis fan headers control in DC mode only - and that will control 4 pin fans but not in PWM mode."
130139
Ridiculously good value considering the price I paid ($20). It's a solid piece of hardware. However, the software is crap, as is the case for all mobile devices today, and by default I'm locked out of fixing the situation.
4260338
The hardware is excellent: functioning, size, weight. It looks and feels solid. It's connection to wifi is fast and solid and it's connection to the iphone is stable. I really wanted to give it 5 stars but the software -the ios app- is clearly bellow the quality of the hardware. I want this gadget mainly to play music. I wanted to replace my old iPod classic and load some 35.000 songs.

The problem is that the app does not respond well. The app has a media window with 4 sections: Photos, Videos, Music and Files. All the music that I downloaded to the WMD was in Files but only some was in the Music section (in some test I have done, none of my music was in the Music section). And it is important to have the songs in the Music section (not only in the Files section) because this allows you to chose by artist, album, song, etc. For those songs that (randomly?) get included in the Music section, the app works lijke a charm. For those that do not, well...find your music in a filing structure. Maybe there is a way to refresh the WMD's data base that I have not found?
247341
In general, I really like Bose hardware, and still do.

However, as other reviewers have stated, this particular product is marred by shoddy software.  Not only does it have a poor UI, which I could forgive, it is also functionally weak.  It turns out that, if you have a large iTunes library, which you store on an external USB drive, this speaker simply won't work for you.  This problem manifests itself by playing a couple of tracks and then dying.  The Soundtouch app shows an error message "unavailable (4201)", which when you look up, gives you a long essay, in the middle somewhere it says "Do not store your music library on a USB hard drive connected to your computer.  They are not supported."
1) Why the hell didn't they say this in the - also poor quality - software documentation?
2) What?  They can't support a USB drive?

For my sins, this happens to be how I store my rather large music library and so this excellent - but completely unusable - piece of hardware is going back.