Being a tech enthusiast is good, but it has its own drawbacks. First, you keep spending money on assorted gadgets till the day when your credit card company sends a friendly warning that you have exceeded the limit. Second, you end up losing track of the gadgets you own. I have a bag full of just cables – it has now become impossible to remember the gadgets they came with.

But what most of the early adopters, like yours truly, encounter are frequent heartbreaks, and most of them are not of our own making.

Often, it is the price that hits the early adopter the hardest. Any mobile phone, especially high-end smartphones, are priced on the higher side when they hit the market. Companies and dealers know there are gadget freaks who will fall for even ridiculous prices because of the novelty factor. The devices are offered at their maximum retail price with some useless freebies thrown in. Even if there is a discount, it is marginal.

Though we know we are sitting ducks, we go and excitedly buy the devices. One month later, we look like idiots when there is a sharp price drop.

Nokia has been notorious for slashing prices within months of launch, especially for devices that don't move well in the market. Though I have bought several devices and almost plunge into depression when the prices fall within months, nothing was more depressing than the price drop for the Nokia PureView 808. I bought it almost at close to Rs 40,000 and within a couple of months, Nokia slashed the prices by almost by half!

Another problem we face is the extra freebies that we might miss out on. One of my friends, who is also an early adopter, threw a tantrum at a showroom when he realised that those who bought the Galaxy Note II later got the flip cover free, while he had to shell out money for it.

The pains early adopters undergo does not stop with gadgets; it applies to services such as email, online banking or online payment services. Most of us registering for such services have to negotiate through all the bugs in the system. Most often, reporting the bugs is a painful ordeal as the customer service executives at the other end themselves are usually not aware of how the service works. More irritating are the offers for not-so-new registrants. A bank offered a Rs 1,000 gift voucher for new registrants. I lost out as I had already registered. Many of the services simply shut down later and you are given a few months’ notice to download the data.

Then there are several social media services you register and then discover none of your friends use it. It especially happens to messaging apps. I have five or six messaging apps in my mobile, with just two or three friends in each.

One of the most irritating aspect for early adopters is the response at the showrooms when we ask for a brand new product. “What? 808? PureView? Is it a phone. No has not been launched in India yet,” was the response I got in at least two showrooms when I first wanted to buy the phone. The third showroom made me wait for 30 minutes as they had to source it from their head office.

This woe is extended to accessories too. Early adopters have to run around a lot for accessories. Most of the time, it takes at least a fortnight for accessories to hit the market. Most of the shopkeepers wouldn’t have even heard of the device. They ask for the device, ask you about the price and other details and try to use it. If it is a camera mobile, the first thing they do is to take a snap. They then click on the photo gallery and browse through the pictures you have taken – and they don’t even bother to ask for permission.

The most irritating thing is that many gadgets flop and go out of production; you are left holding a gadget that is likely to get no updates - or worse, no support. You can also forget about getting spares. A service centre refused to believe that a pocket camera was just one year old. “I have never seen this. It must be a fake,” was his response. I had to use his computer to show the model in the company’s web site. “Oh, it means you have bought a super-flop model,” he said. All I could do was to look at him sheepishly.

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