The Brain of Shawn

It’s hard to explain to my boss that I’m doing technology related product research when there is a guy playing with a Barbie on my screen. I’m just kidding Shawn I love the little extra things you throw into the reviews. It makes work a little more tolerable.

I got excited when you mentioned that the linutop was totally sealed. I was ready to order one for a factory environment I support that uses thin clients. So when you got to the part about it being useful as a thin client in a factory setting I was already in agreement.

You didn’t mention if the linutop can be used as a typical thin client that will boot with specific connection settings. I also did not find anything about that on the linutop website.

As far as I can tell the linutop is useless in most settings. Their website claims that “Linutop provides a new user experience to access digital contents.” Well that’s nice but I am a new Linux user and Xubuntu does everything that does. They also claim on their website that it’s useful in a public computer or kiosk setting. I would disagree since that USB stick is easy to steal. That forces you to lock the device away for safety. So if you have to do that anyway why wouldn’t you just use a regular PC and get more functionality?

Alright sorry for the long rant but you were totally right to judge the Linutop as lacking. It’s a poorly thought out product that should not even be on the market as far as I can tell. If anything I would have liked to see you flat out bash the product for being released before it was ready.

I think that it’s fine to talk about things you dislike about a product. But leave it at just listing them, explaining them, just the facts. At the end there you started rambling on and on about the high price - you don’t need to say the same thing three times, once is enough. Also, there were a couple times you made a scoffing noise. I think that detracted from the overall review and could certainly be interpreted as bashing by the company.

Also, “I don’t know what I’m talking about” isn’t very helpful. At the end where you said “maybe there’s a market for this but I sure don’t know what it is” just makes me think you were too lazy to do some research. It would’ve been better to skip all that and just tell people to go to the website.

1. Yes, please do post reviews even when you don’t like the product. It’s not a waste of our time; it’s a fair warning about the awfulness that is “Product X”.

2. For video reviews, you should stick to items that either have the wow-factor. Additional text reviews of other items would be nice though.

3. Given your choice of co-hosts, I’d say these video reviews are shooting to both entertain as well as inform. Provided that assumption holds true, feel free to be harsher on the negative aspects of the products.