Jon followed up with a brief heuristic evaluation of the PlusDeck2, the device we mentioned last week that converts audio tapes to MP3’s.

In a nutshell, he managed to install the drive in one of our PCs over here exactly as promised - in an existing drive slot. True, he knocked over a few things on our absent finance person’s desk while using it as a workbench. And there was an alarming amount of dust on what I knew to be a brand-new Dell. But that aside, within about 30-45 minutes of opening the box, he was sliding an old cassette tape into his computer (which is a bit of a weird sight). Apparently, although some of the hardware installation instructions were a little opaque, the new device was instantly recognized by the WinTel system once the PC was booted up, and the software interface opened right up with no hassles. Score two for BTO.

That said, apparently PlusDeck2 falls short in one area: it converts the tape to one long file. To break this into individual tracks, you need (that’s right) another piece of software. To me, this is sort of akin to selling someone a cellphone without a battery. Duh - you want to plug it in and go. However, it being the 21st century and Jon being Jon, that software wasn’t hard to find. He wound up using polderbitS. Net net, he seems pleased - and one has to conclude that BTO therefore spent a fair amount of time making sure that their product really was pretty close to plug and play.

JF

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 16th, 2005 at 2:29 pm and is filed under General, Usability, Finds, Interaction Strategy.