Not any good at all with that feature turned all the way ...
591903
The ring is so low did no one knew it had ever rang for the first week...only when it was totally silent could you hear a very faint ring.  Not any good at all with that feature turned all the way up.
Emerson EM300WH Big Button Corded Phone
4275129
Much better than the last piece of junk I paid 3x more for that Amazon immediately yanked after I bought that one. However does have it's quirks.

The error messages on this thing are in broken English so my guess is that the software was developed by people who didn't speak English very well or they just shoved their Chinese or Indian or whatever through a canned translator.

The software has bugs. This device is not tested well. I watch a lot of videos with it and it occasionally gets into states where it doesn't function properly such as not being able to get out of or into a menu or activate a feature, etc... Sometimes powering it off and on from the remote fixes it, but occasionally I have to pull the plug because it no longer responds to the remote at all.

Speaking of remotes, this IR remote I got with the device is so weak that you have to point it directly and perfectly at the device and literally be within 5 feet or it won't detect the remote at all. 6 feet and it doesn't work, literally. Not pointed perfectly at it and it doesn't work. I'm continually having to extend my arm out and aim the thing at the device before it'll do anything. I eliminated the batteries as a problem. 2 sets of new batteries checked with a voltmeter did not help.  Also the buttons on this remote are super tiny. It's difficult to press the correct button because they are all crowded together so tightly, especially in dim light.

The organization of this thing makes no sense. All my videos are classified as "movies" even though the vast majority are not. To watch a recorded video, you have to back out and select PVR instead of movies and it gives you the same directory structure and you have to arrow down their HBPVR directory to see the recordings. It will not show videos in PVR mode. It will not show PVR recording in "Movie" (video) mode even though they're all just video files. Videos are videos. This is of the things about this device that is stupid and annoying.

When you select a video to view, it comes up in a pip screen and then you have to go to another button on the remote called "hold" (???)  to get the video to go to full screen. You have to do this every time you select a video. Every time. Every time.

What does work on this thing is that it will awaken itself and record what you have it set to record, something the last piece of garbage I bought wouldn't do with any kind of dependability. Again however, this device can occasionally get into states where it's not functioning properly, so you have to be careful to reboot it if you think there's any chance it is in a state to make sure it doesn't fowl up the recording. I've been lucky with this one so far. The only problem I have had is that you have to go in and select your time zone and flip a daylight savings time flag before it will record at the right time and record the right program.

Bottom line is that for about $30, this device is ok. If you're careful and are good at learning workarounds to make something hobble along and work, this will do the job. It's a pain ITA occasionally. It's hard to use it's remote. It's software is not well written or tested, but it is only $30 and you're getting an HD quality tuner and recorder. Unlike many recording DVRs, you can pull your recorded files off and save them forever and you can put other files onto the hard drive connected to this device and if it's supports the video's extension and it'll play them.

I won't be buying anymore of these however. I'd like something that designed and functions better and more reliably. If I find it, it'll probably cost a lot more and will be worth it. If you're living on Ramen noodles however, this may be the device for you.
2474537
I have always been a fan of Garmin products. Sadly Garmin has taken many huge steps backwards.  When Garmin first came out with handheld GPS, I was among the first to get one.  The menu was simple and intuitive.  This is muddled with crap that is virtually useless, and the functions that you really desire are less functioning.  I bought this so that I could take it with me on hikes, and easily find my way back if I were to get disoriented or lost. It takes too many steps to perform this simple function of backtracking.  It's ridiculous.  Their very first model was much more functional.  I didn't want a toy to search for treasures.  I wanted a functional and easy to set up method for finding my way back to the trail.  This totally missed the mark for me.

I still enjoy Garmin GPSmap on my boat, and use the Nuvi in the car when I need to, but I am really disappointed in this.  I purchased the "extra" map and it is also virtually useless.  This doesn't even qualify as a toy.  It is absolute junk.  I wish there was something positive that I could say about this, but there is absolutely no practical use for this.  My iphone performs better.  I really can't believe that they would actually sell this.
731263
I'm sorry to have to report that this it a terrible device.

The controls are completely unintuitive -- clearly, the choice was made to favor minimalism over function.  So the buttons serve dual purposes, except that the important functions are not marked and the only way you can find out about them is by reading the manual.

The system switches between 'active' and 'inactive' by holding down a button for a few seconds.  But your timing has to be pretty accurate -- too long and nothing happens.  Too short and nothing happens.

When trying to wake up to music, the music comes on at full volume...a fairly jarring awakening considering that most systems have a 'slow start'.

About the only nice things I can say about this product is that a) it looks cute, and b) the fact that it sets its clock off of a connected iPhone has probably saved me even more battling with the buttons.

Strongly not recommended.
4730099
Its an underwhelming, greatly overpriced fad gadget, complete with the most poorly designed remote ever. The only good thing about this hulu/netflix/subscription navigator its that is uses less energy than my old playstation3. Oh, and did I mention how much I hate the remote. There's so much to complain about regarding the remote that I'd likely run out of allowable  typespace.
1217082
I owned the predecessor to this product in the late 90s and it worked okay. I was hoping version 11.5 would be much better. in reality it just contains a whole new set of headaches. this product is almost unusable in a normal office. If you get a phone call you can tell the microphone to go to sleep. In sleep mode it stops typing but still listens to everything you are sayingand tries to turn all of that into a command. There is no way to shut off  command mode.  Even if you take the microphone off and set it on the desk It will pickup background noise andmove the cursor around from one location on the page to another, open and close apps and documents and once it shut down the system while I was on the phone. I believe this product is way overpriced for what you get. note: I have left a few of the typos in this document just because I'm so tired of going back to put spaces between words and correct capitalization that it seldom gets right.
3607502
Wow, what a disappointment. I had bought this as a cheap replacement for my '96 Infinity stereo. It lists lots of features and I thought it was a great price for all of the features (all over-rated!) it has. My complaints?....well, first of all, the DVD display is so small that it's really difficult to even watch a movie. The diplays are so small that you can't make out anything unless you have a magnifying glass, especially in the daylight. It's also difficult to FF and RW a CD because you have to tap the little buttons a few times to make it FF or RW faster, and if you don't hold it down long enough, it thinks you want to change tracks all together. The Blue Tooth feature isn't very good either. I sold my car a few months after installing this stereo and although I could have put my old stereo back in, I hated this one enough to give it to the new owner.
1090606
What a piece of garbage. Never has my expectations been so let down. First off, and most importantly, you CANNOT assign custom functions to the left/right tilt wheel. You can customize ever other button to ANYTHING, even application specific, but nooooo the tilt wheel is for SCROLLING ONLY. That's just plain stupid. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to customize the tilt wheel when I can configure every other button, including the middle click, besides the fact that microsoft just plain forgot to put it in the software.

Also, the blue 'start' button is waaaay too far forward to be useful. i have large hands, and i still can't click the damn thing without turning the mouse 30 degrees to the left. i don't understand why there's so many positive reviews, this mouse is awful.
4853763
Let's compare this to TomTom I got as a gift 5 years ago.
1. The speed-time-elevation-etc bar takes approximately 1/4 of the screen, and most of it is DEAD GREY area. This is so stupid! On my old TomTom it would take roughly 1/6 of the screen, all data organized in small yet clearly readable letters and numbers.
2. The detour option is extremely idiotic. If you click on "detour" it will generate a new route for you without asking any further questions. It's like going to a doctor and saying "well, doctor, I have this problem...", and he would cut in by saying "it's Ok, here is the medicine - take one pill every morning. What's that? No, I don't need any details, this medicine is for everything". My old TomTom got an elaborate interface for the detour option, it will care to ask where is the roadblock or what parts of the route to be avoided.
3. Browse the map option. On my old TomTom you can click on "put my car in the center". No such luxury here. It will open the map wherever it feels like it, good luck scrolling to where you are.
Very disappointed. What beats me how come the Garmin morons cannot simply copy the nice features from their competitors? I'm not talking patent infringement, I'm talking common sense things. I hope they go out of business.
4688831
Cons:
The touch screen capabilities are very sluggish.
Contrast really sucks.
Back up camera does not automatically come on your screen when you engage reverse, you have to select the camera icon in order for it to work.
It takes about a minute for the system to load after you turn on your car, Which means you cannot engage reverse and expect the unit to detect your rearview camera.
The GPS is alright, it has a couple of nice features, but it really sucks when one tries to save an address or create an address book, as a matter of fact it doesn't even have that feature.

I could go on and on explaining that really sucky things that this unit has, my word of advice to you is that if you can afford a better unit, just go for the better unit.
4924952
Easy to use, no fees for updates.  That is all that is good about this.  The button on the side are located in the wrong areas.  If your golf glove or anything else touches one of the control buttons (4) is goes to different modes.  The touch screen is a joke for locating distances.  It is designed to drag the line to the hazard or target you want.  Well try dragging this line with any accuracy, which means you have no idea how far the water carry or other hazard is.  Given this is a big part of this product, I give it 0 stars on buttons and ability to locate distances  on hazards.  The nice front, center and back of the green is fine.  However, you can purchase something that simple for far less than this device costs.  I will be selling mine, anyone interested?
2934278
Several problems with this device.  Would not recommend under any circumstances.  First is that the door we placed this on had an offset peep hole (sort of over the door knob).  The field of view on the camera doesn't not capture someone standing in a natural location with this peephole placement.  Since we placed this in an apartment, we weren't able to just drill a new peephole.

So, we figured at least we'd catch someone if they walked into the apartment, however the software seems to have crapped out and we couldn't even access the recordings after a couple of weeks of use.  Now we are beyond the return policy date, so we are stuck with a useless, rather expensive, piece of technology.

I, personally, will avoid all Brinno products at this point given my experience with this product.
570933
I bought this receiver and returned it within a week.  When it was working the sound was good about this product and having an "all Sony" environment meant the remote worked across devices.  That's all that I can good about this product.

The "Bravia Sync" feature with my Sony TV worked on intermittently.  On more than one occasion the receiver simply stopped passing video through from the set top box to the TV.  Any use of my Sony Blu Ray player (whether Bravia sync was active or not) would disrupt the Bravia sync with the TV to the point that every Bravia-sync setting had to be reconfigured manually.

The on-screen menu created by the receiver is horrid -- looks like it was designed in the mid-1990s.  When the TV/Receiver powered up in Bravia sync mode, about 1/3 of the time the on-screen menu capability would activate and create 20+ rows of gibberish letters across the screen requiring the use of the remote to clear.

Manual is cryptic and written with very rough english.

Completely disappointed in Sony.
921763
I bought this headset to replace a 3 year old Motorola headset that had the plastic ear clip break. I use this with an IPhone 4S. Here are the things I really did not like about the Jawbone ERA:

* The touch feature (tap the headset) just doesn't work that great. You have to really hit it to get the it to pick up, to the point you're hurting your ear drum from the pressure.

* The only button on it tells you the battery life remaining when pressed. If you hold it down you will access Siri. Why wouldn't they make the most used function (activate Siri) the thing when the button is pressed? It's not a short hold either, 1-2 seconds until a beep occurs (not Siri's beep, more on that next). It says you can program it with a new app, but there is no way to change this functionality, only what happens when you HOLD the button. I'm constantly being told the battery life of the headset...completely useless information.

* When you do hold the button and access Siri, you'll hear a SERIES of beeps, all of which is just the headset telling you that it has recognized the button being held down. Some 3 seconds later (not exaggerating) you will finally hear the Siri been come on and you can talk to Siri. If you're adding it up, that is 1-2 seconds of holding the button, and 3 more seconds for Siri to come up, for a total of 5 seconds until you can use Siri!

* The power switch is very small, so you pretty much have to leave it on all the time. If you put it in your pocket, that means you're going to be pocket dialing and accessing Siri all the time (who knows what she's capable of!). And if you're thinking that you'll just shut it off in your pocket, then don't plan on answering a phone call with it. By the time you take it out of you pocket, find the little power switch (which takes fingernails to turn on), and get it to sync (which might not happen, read next section), you've missed the call.

* If you turn the device off and turn it back on, it's a 50/50 chance it'll pair back up with you phone. Half the time, it doesn't pair up and I have to shake the thing (literally, you have to shake it back and forth 4 times to activate pairing) to get it to try to pair, which sometimes doesn't work but that might be the fault of the IPhone.

* The main reason I bought the Jawbone ERA was because people said it had the best call quality. However, there have been a number of times where the audio was very broken. People on the other end don't have problems (which, going back and reading the reviews I read, this call quality for the OTHER person is what was so impressive).

* Installing drivers on Windows - this is a stretch because there are a lot other factors involved, but as soon as I plugged this thing into my laptop and installed the drivers, my USB mouse and keyboard that was hooked up stopped and required me to reboot my computer. The software runs through a web browser and the first time using it I had a lot of issues where syncing would stop at 4% and wouldn't get past it. Eventually (couple days later) I tried again and it worked.

I do not recommend this if you have an IPhone and like to use Siri. Actually, it's hard to recommend this to anyone. And just as a litmus test, here's what I got from the Motorola headset that made it 100% better: a call came in, I turned on the headset and it automatically picked up. There was one big button that when I hit it, it INSTANTLY activated Siri.

I will be gluing my old headset back together to use over the Jawbone ERROR. Just wish I didn't throw away the packaging so I could return it!
984102
I absolutely hate this thing. As a matter of fact i have more or less given it away. I was so Extremely disappointed with this gps that i was ready to throw it out of the window on my trip across the usa. I even downloaded the latest update the night before the trip. I tried it out the night before i left on the trip to see how it worked and it couldn't find a local supermarket that has been at the same location with the same address for 17+ years. And then on the trip it took us up roads that were not actual roads. It tried to take us way out of our way to get to different locations which we had to just use the town name and not the attractions name and address as this gps said didn't exist. Example Durango Silverton and Colorado. By the way for the majority of the trip our IPhones with Waze or the factory installed maps worked awesome with the exception of the fee places we didn't have cell service but i knew this would be an issue thats why I bought this gps unit. Another big disappointment and this i was willing to overlook as no map system can keep up with is the feature of showing you the lane arrangement for interchanges and exists. So many areas we passed through had been recently or were currently being changed around and the gps had no clue what the new configuration was. So this feature is actually kind of useless and occasionally dangerous.
2914008
There are a lot of great new features on the Kindle 2.  I won't waste time with that because you will read that from many others and I don't want to waste my breath.  BUT....

After all the time and money that that was sunk into research and development to create the Kindle 2, and they couldn't even bother to fix one of the major complaints with the Kindle 1?  I am NOT happy!

The "Prev Page/Next Page" buttons on the left, and the "Home/Next Page" buttons on the right are still in the way.  And I don't mean just a little in the way.  These buttons are placed in the most natural position where most people, myself included, tend to hold a book.  It is so frustrating to be reading along and to find yourself back on the next page, the previous page, or maybe even several pages forward or backward because you accidental pushed a button while reading.

At least there is a slightly larger margin of plastic between the edge of the Kindle 2 where the buttons are, and the screen itself.  So if you are very careful, you can hold the Kindle 2 with your thumbs only in this small margin, only to hit the buttons with the side of your hand, as these buttons run right along the right and left edges of the unit.

Thousands upon thousands of people complained about this feature in the Kindle 1, and yet they couldn't bother to fix this in the Kindle 2?  I don't get it?  There is an extra 3" space above where the buttons are.  They should have been moved up at least some.

I may actually send this piece of crap back.
2862846
None of the features panned out the way I expected.

WATER USE:
Yes, it's waterproof, but it doesn't help if it takes terrible underwater pictures. Even if you could maneuver the non-user friendly settings/options, there is no way you can get the lighting and speed right. All my pix came out blurry or discolored. I would have been better off with a disposable camera.

LAND USE:
I liked the idea of having a drop-proof sturdy camera, but unfortunately it could not take decent land pictures :( They were pretty low quality...smartphones take better pix than this.