Why Do My Gadgets Hate Me?

Two years ago I got my first Treo cell phone. I thought I was the coolest kid on the block. Now I'm ready to hurl the thing out my 12th floor window, or at least marinate it overnight in a bowl of coffee. Why? It's got a serious case of response-time sluggishness, aka button lag. Every time I click one of the onscreen controls (voicemail, contacts, etc.) I end up having to wait while the thing...what? calculates? eats its mini-processor spinach? I don't know...but whatever it's doing, it's taking way too long, making me give less than a hoot about all the other things it supposedly can do (take pictures, videos, browse the Web, listen to music). Now I know I can spend time reading through the help section of Palm's Web site or Verizon's (my cell carrier), but, c'mon: I just want the thing to work.

That's what this blog is all about: getting all the gadgets in my life (and my fellow bloggers' lives) to play nicely with me...and with each other. We're going to be defining gadgets pretty broadly here: basically anything with an inner nervous system made of silicon or electronics. That means cell phones, digital cameras, WiFi picture frames, Internet-enabled refrigerators, you name it.

What you won't find here is a long list of every new gadget known to humankind. A few of our fellow bloggers (Engadget, Gizmodo) do a great job of satisfying every geek's new product jones (me very much included). What you will find, instead, is some frontline reporting on everything from researching which products to buy, how to handle nasty battles with clueless and antagonistic salescreeps, and, most importantly, how to get everything working once you've got it home.

Finally, as you might expect from a blog that's part of the Missing Manual family, everything you read here will be written in the same reader-friendly style that have made bestsellers out of so many books in our series. Our goal with every Missing Manual is to help readers get things done, and to share our enthusiasm for how much fun you can have when you control your gadgets and your computer...rather than the other way around. Feel free to join the conversation by chiming in with a comment, or drop me a note and let me know what topics you'd like to see us cover.