TAO 1.4" Digital Key chain Review

By budda on Saturday, August 30th, 2008 comments

Last year we covered the launch of the new digital key chain from TAO Electronics. This year TAO sent us one to use in the real world.

The 1.4" keychain produce comes packaged in a decent quality box, containing the keychain, mini CD, usb cable and usage instruction leaflet.

The mini CD provided drivers for Windows XP machines. This is where the big problem began.
The TAO website provides downloads of their TAO Image manager software for Windows Vista and Mac OS X. I was pleasantly surprised to find support for Apple's OS provided at all.

When plugged in to a USB port the device doesn't show as a mass storage drive, meaning you have to use the incredibly painful TAO software.

Under Windows Vista the software continually crashed when trying to navigate the file system to even find my photos to load in and resize. Rubbish

So I swapped to the software on the Mac, which looked similar in badly designed user interface as the Windows version. The Mac version loaded the images okay, cropped and resized them fine. However when it came to publishing the image collection to the keychain it all went down the pan and eventually caused the key chain to reverse all its status messages on the 1.4" screen - along with changing the background colour to red.

A red background colour would seem to signify an error - see thumbnail image above. No support response on the issue via email, and no help from their website have finally brought me to the conclusion that these mini digital keychain products are rubbish.

It's worth noting that TAO Electronics are not alone with shitty key chain products, this is the third one I've had no joy with this year.

Avoid at all costs.