Holiday Tech Meltdown, Holiday Gadget Horror Stories

Reports are coming in from readers of holiday purchases gone horribly awry.

It seems like some readers have bought gadgets as gifts, only to have their holiday dreams of gadgety fun cruelly dashed. Some gadgets have been more or less rendered useless, whereas others have even caught fire.

One example is of the eStarling WiFi digital picture frame (review here):

“Bought one of these for the parents, received in advance of the holiday to set it up and try out. All worked as advertised….until yesterday. E-mailing pictures fails most of the time, the server responds with denial of service frequently because eStarling frames apparently sold well this season. RSS feeds didn’t update at all yesterday and today there’s duplicate pictures from the RSS feeds. Uploading isn’t much better given the server times out and you can only upload 4 pictures at one time. Sad ending to what appeared to be a great idea and terrific gift…imagine a digital frame that the not-so-tech-savvy parents could enjoy. Keep imagining.”

- Thanks to John Jeandron