The five most pointless Sony products ever

By Nate Lanxon on 22 April 2009, 12:50pm

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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? Marvellous. PlayStation? Paradigm-shifting. Bravia? Boodiful. But it'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 allows us to create freakshows, and caged five mutated, repulsive curiosities for you to point and laugh at. And more importantly, they're backed up by solid, not-even-slightly-obtuse arguments.

"HiFD is destined to become the floppy disk of the 21st century," claimed Sony's Takayasu Hirano in 1998. And he was absolutely correct: in the 21st century, they're equally defunct.

Sony pioneered the 3.5-inch floppy drive in the 1980s. But by the late 90s, Sony needed a successor to its dying 1.4MB baby. It had become the magnetic equivalent of the once-adorable son, who subsequently tried to make a living playing the spoons when everyone else was buying drum kits.

Sony's answer was HiFD -- the high-capacity successor to the 3.5-inch floppy. Announced in 1997 and first shipped in 1998, the first 150MB HiFDs were compatible only with Sony's HiFD drives. The problem was, the drives themselves suffered from technical hardware problems and Sony suspended shipments, although units were never recalled.

Fast-forward to 1999 and HiFD was re-released in an improved 200MB version. Their accompanying drives remained backwards-compatible with the original 3.5-inch floppy disks, and this time functioned properly. They offered maximum read/write speeds of 3.6MBps and 1.2MBps respectively.

But it failed to make the format anything more than irrelevent -- like Katy Perry, only less demented -- as both Iomega's Zip drives and the CD-R had scored enough popularity points to steal Sony's limelight.

Ultimately, it was CD-R that triumphed, and DVD-R that continued the optical storage trend into the 21st century.

From flopped floppy disks to other discs that flopped. Sony's almost erotic fascination with creating proprietary media formats is excruciating. Like an abscess in the face. And the PSP's MiniDisc-esque Universal Media Disc is just one of many questionable strings on Sony's haggard proprietary bow.

In fairness, as a games console cartridge, we can forgive it -- it's robust, and has a large 1.8GB capacity, but a small 64mm (2.5-inch) diameter. But when Sony tried to introduce the heavily DRMed format as a medium for movies, we face-palmed, wept and lost the will even to breathe in and out. For weeks our only sustenance came from drinking our own tears.

It may have been technically credible, but its capacity limited it from containing the wealth of bonus features DVD could handle. The PSP couldn't output to a TV set, plus there was no way to put your own video on a movie UMD -- and they were expensive. Yet there was Sony, pushing it on to store shelves, fiercely marketing it as a viable portable media format, persuading people to invest good money in a ridiculous product doomed to failure. There were no other ways to watch these movies but on a PSP, and this was its Achilles heel.

Eventually it was canned, thanks to lacklustre consumer demand, and shops sold off excess stock on the cheap.

The only good news? Rumour has it Sony will ditch UMD altogether in the next PSP. Oh well.