Last year humans world wide spent an estimated US$100 billion on products for dogs. With a market that big is it surprising that some of those products would be, shall we say, sub-optimal?

With that in mind Spot Cool Stuff decided to take one of our occasional breaks in our quest for superlative stuff and look instead for the worst. In this case, the worst dog products we could find.

If you’re more feline inclined don’t feel left out—we’ll review the worst cat gadgets and products in the future. Sign up for our tech RSS feed to get that, and all our tech articles, delivered to you by email. Or join us on Twitter or Facebook, to be notified when that comes out.

Continue →

Wow! What kind of car is that?!

That was the question drivers rolled down their windows to ask us every few blocks as we were test driving the 2011 Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet through downtown Dallas, Texas. On the highway, cars adjusted their speed so to drive alongside us for a closer look. When we stopped in a Starbucks, we overheard customers entering the coffee shop talking about what a sleek set of wheels we had.

Nissan flew Spot Cool Stuff to Dallas for their media unveiling of the world’s first all-wheel drive crossover convertible vehicle¹ in advance of the vehicle’s April sales launch. From the moment we saw the Murano CrossCabriolet we knew it would be a head turner—it’s unlike any other vehicle on the market today. But is it worth its $46,390 price tag? Our review:

Continue →

You are hosting a cocktail party and want music—the same music—playing in your living room, your dining room and your outside patio. You want to control your music from a single source but don’t want to run wires all over your house.

The Sonos Multi-Room Music System is exactly what you are looking for.

Sonos is a modular system that creates a wireless network linking multiple speakers with multiple audio sources. With Sonos you can play a CD or an MP3 or stream internet radio and listen on any, or all, of the network’s speakers.

At least you can theoretically. As will all products we test, Spot Cool Stuff started out skeptical of the Sonos system; we were especially dubious of Sonos’ claim that this complicated-sounding speaker network would be easy to set up. Here’s what we found:

Continue →

A gadget that supposedly translates dog barks into human speech—is it cool or just plain kooky?

What an incredible year 2009 was for gadgets and technology. Here’s a countdown of our favorite posts from the year past:

Continue →