The speed of technological advancement is all well and good but somewhere along the line quality is being eroded. Gone are the days when you could happily buy a product and be safe in the knowledge that a few years later it’ll still be in good working order.

The marketplace is now filled with endless tech products filling the store shelves, all making claims to be better than the last version and giving you more than you had before. Little is made to improve quality, as nothing it seems, is made for a life-span lasting over six months or more before a new and improved model appears.

One such area that never stands still is MP3 players. They are getting smaller and larger in storage capacities by the week, gone are the days when 2GB players were considered more than enough, 32GB devices are all the rage (though quite why you’d need thousands and thousands of tracks on you wherever you go is a mystery).

If these marvels of the modern era were reliable in any way then I’d be spreading the gospel of tech wherever I could but the reality is all too real; alot of these wonder products don’t stand the test of any time and many fail within the first year of use. You could argue that the don’t have to last as these products are constanly being updated and devices are obsolete within 12 months.

A prime example of flawed tech is the Samsung YP-Z5 player, this was released near the end of 2006 after many great reviews hailed it as a stylish piece of kit to own. Months later, search the internet and you’ll find no end of complaints and disappointed owners of the YP-Z5 model; citing no end of issues and problems with the software, players going dead and file corruption are numerous stories you can read..

The Samsung customer service has been less-than-helpful no matter where in the world the problems have arisen. The virtually-useless warranty of 12 months is criminal, Samsung have not honoured any complaints about these flawed players; it’s shabby service and does them no help when all people read is negative comments about the Samsung name. When these products are retailing at over £100 you expect them to last for years, not be ready for the bin after a few months.

Unfortunately for Samsung, they’ve also displayed some trouble in sorting out issues concerning one of their Fridge-Freezers; basically it was cooler outside than inside where the food was. The problem was made public through a UK show “Watchdog”, then and only then did Samsung spring into action and fix all the faults revealed by the show.

Microsoft have also suffered a bad press about their maligned XBox 360 games machine and its worrying failure rate, but in their defence they have increased the warranty on all machines to five years, quite a big step-up for a major name in the technology business.

Now if all manufacturers were to give a realistic warranty on products, we all know it’s a fast moving world when it comes to technology but at least make somebody’s purchase worthwhile rather than take their money and run!