Public Hardware Beta Tests

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday April 10, 2003 @02:02PM from the first-one-is-free dept.

orangerobot writes "Commercial software companies have performed public beta tests of their products for quite some time but more recently Philips Electronics has started holding public betas of new consumer hardware gadgets. A few months ago it was the Streamium MC-i250, and now it's their iPod clone the HDD-100. Public hardware betas seem like a great way to do a bit of marketing and user testing at the same time maybe more companies will pick up the same idea." This seems like a great idea for a company wanting to collect usability data on their interfaces, so that the release version can be tweaked.

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This is a great idea... by alwsn · 2003-04-10 14:08 · Score: 5, Interesting

Having just filled out the form, this is a win win for Philips. Only 50 people will get the hardware, which costs them next to nothing.

But when they get out of the deal is thousdands of people filling out pretty detailed information that they normally wouldn't fill out in the hopes of getting something for free.

Good idea.