The five most pointless Sony products ever

If you thought the hayfever hat--a hat with a built-in toilet roll dispenser--was the definitive example of humanity's passion for the pointless, a glance in the direction of Sony's decades-old portfolio of products may interest you.

Now, we're huge fans of much of Sony's work. MiniDisc? Marvelous. PlayStation? Paradigm-shifting. Bravia? Boodiful. But the company's made more than its fair share of absolute stinkers, so gather round. We've gone all 19th century on Sony, defying the ethics that no longer allow us to create freak shows, and caged five mutated, repulsive curiosities for you to point and laugh at. More importantly, they're backed up by solid, not-even-slightly-obtuse arguments.

Click through our gallery to see what we mean. Anything we missed?

(Via Crave UK)

[MWillis561]

I was expecting technology that was more on the end of devices. Some of the things that first come to my mind are minidiscs. Granted these were pretty big when they came out it was just another failure by Sony in trying to establish a format.

Another would have to be the Mylo. Talk about a pointless device. Who knows what you would exactly do with it that you can't use your cellphone for. Yet they still sell the thing.

Last one would have to be the Sony Rolly. What market are they trying to appeal to with this mp3 player. Does anybody really desire to have one and if so how often would you use it.

[iamwho]

I would disagree with the word "pointless". Few companies on this planet can establish a standard format the way Sony can. However, it is clear that Sony could stand to exercise more discipline in their product development process. It seems that if an engineer can make an idea work, they will put it on the market, never mind the actual NEED for it.

I think also the Beta-VHS war has been etched onto their corporate minds, so they feel the need to own a given format. Also, since Sony is a major content provider, they are in the unique position-slash-dilemma of wanting to sell content WHILE protecting it WHILE drumming up new ways of delivering that content.

Sir Howard might feel differently, but perhaps Sony is an octopus with about six too many arms. He needs to exercise far better muscle control.

[PascalForget]

What about the Rolly?

[Tech Diva XXX]

There's a point to many of their products, and that's to keep the consumer locked down to Sony products or into DRM.

Memory Stick and M2 cards are one BIG example. If you want to use a Sony product that requires a memory card, that's what you MUST use. UMD is an example of both. Of course you can always load movies onto the proprietary memory stick duo. So they've got you both ways.

That rootkit crap is another of Sony going overboard with DRM. Sonic Stage is another, although you didn't mention software. But I hear people's MP3s got locked up and restricted with some versions of that software and the players that used it! MP3s mind you!

I don't hate Sony but some of their practices really annoy me!