You might be unsure how to buy the best possible technology for your needs and we know it isn’t always the easiest decision, particularly if you’re not particularly savvy.
1. Don’t Buy By Price
The biggest mistake most people make is to say something like “I want a laptop/ digital camera/ etc, which is cheapest?”. While budget is certainly an issue, going for the cheapest is almost always a false economy.
When you think about it, the cheapest tends to mean the gadget has been built to a budget so at every possible corner money has been saved, for example a cheaper screen, slower processor, minimal battery, etc.
As a general rule, if you can go up in price by about 25% above the lowest price then you will get far more than 25% extra in terms of features. The reason is that these products have to justify why they aren’t as cheap as the others and they do so by adding in better features and hence fiercely competitive.
A simple example:
- buying a £400 laptop (which is about the cheapest) you’ll find a ‘Celeron’ process which is slow, small hard-drive, minimal RAM a DVD drive but nothing special
- for around £500 you’ll get a better screen, a dual-core or better regular processor, larger hard-drive, more RAM and a DVD-Rewriter, possibly even Blu-Ray
The same extends to smaller products like buying a digital camera, don’t buy the one that seems to have similar features/spec but it sub-£100 from ‘TechCompany’, get the one for £110 from Canon or Nikon and the difference in lense quality, battery-life and picture-taking ability will be worth it.
2. Obtain Quality Advice
Searching Google for ‘Product I Want Review’ will tend to result in a real mix of responses, most of which will be price-comparison sites (which are very biased) to pages which some companies actually fill out reviews on their own products to gain more sales.
Firstly, go to sites you trust, while Amazon is still susceptible to review-stuffing a few reviews, mix of good and bad will really give you a feel for a product.
Secondly, ask your friends. While there are lots of tech products out there, you’ll find that in most cases someone knows a bit about the TV you’re looking to get or can tell you about the quality of a Dell Laptop versus a Sony.
Thirdly, trust your instincts. If it looks a little poor quality in the small image the real thing could be a lot worse. A safe way to counter this is to check whether major retailers sell it, does John Lewis or PC World stock it? If no brand that you know seems to stock it then you can probably assume it’s not quite what its cracked up to be.
3. Start With What You Need
Purchasing a car you determine what you want to do with it (transport a family, be a sports car, etc) and then you look for the vehicle that meets those needs. The same is true of technology, all laptops, cameras, etc are not the same and you will save yourself a lot of confusing heart-ache if you know what you want it to do before you start.
Some key areas to define regardless of gadget
- Size: does it need to be portable (some laptops are real behemoths), how small (a compact digital fits in your pocket versus a more capable Digital SLR which doesn’t)
- Quality: with cameras particularly what are you really planning to do with the photos, if it’s view them on screen and print them up on A4 photo paper then you really don’t need 12 MegaPixels (that’s the size of a poster!), it’s better to focus on a good quality lense (eg. a Carl Zeiss) than the latest model
- Speed: although we’d all like our gadgets to be blisteringly fast if you’re really going to do a bit of photo editing, emails and surfing the net you don’t need a laptop with 4 processors that can play some game at a rate of 20fps, almost any modern laptop can do these basic tasks
You’ll find that if you’re honest with yourself you end up with a list of minimum spec that is relatively easy to match up with a product and might mean you actually need to spend less than you originally thought!
4. Try It Out!
We all know from experience that specifications are one thing, the actual experience can be completely different. For example, two cars could seem identical but you just prefer the driving position of one over another. Over the lifetime of a piece of tech the same thing is true, it’s the small details that will either give you a lot of pleasure or drive you nuts.
You can easily try out most tech that is worth buying at shops like PC World and department stores, and you may well find a product that meets your needs that looking at the spec online you wouldn’t have given a second look.
- Are the buttons big enough and well placed for my fingers? Similarly, does the keyboard feel nice?
- Is it really as light or smooth looking as it seems in the photos?
- How does the menu system function (these can be particularly annoying)?
In the case of something like a mobile phone, try out a friend’s for a day. You might find you love the BlackBerry’s buttons and hate the iPhone despite the advice you were given by a well-meaning friend.
