Britons waste £52 billion on gadgets they don't understand
Technology-mad Britons are wasting £52 billion every year on gadgets they cannot operate properly, according to a survey.
Despite UK consumers splashing out an average of £3,065 each year on electronics, the research by Sky HD highlighted the significant gadget gap between spending and usage.
The nationwide poll of 3,000 people revealed although consumers made the most of their traditional electrics - such as microwaves and washing machines - half the functions on their higher-tech gadgets were left idle.
Expensive new high-definition (HD) TVs proved particularly costly, with nearly half (47%) of those surveyed unaware an HD TV needs to be connected to an HD set-top box to see the benefits.
Two per cent even believed you needed to be born with HD Ready eyesight to watch the new format.
Stuff magazine's editor Fraser Macdonald said: "It's amazing how much money people are wasting by not using things to their full potential.
"An HD TV is an essential purchase, for example, but it'll be so much better if you hook it up to a decent HD set-top box, a Blu-ray player and a surround sound speaker set-up."
But the picture across the UK revealed some regional anomalies. The least tech-savvy city was Glasgow, with Glaswegians using just 42% of the functions available on their gadgets.
In contrast, Wolverhampton's residents got the most value for their money, utilising almost 80% of their gadgets' abilities.
The results also supported a couple of old gender stereotypes, with 63% of women reading the instruction manual compared with just 54% of men, and males half as likely to seek help if their technology failed.
The £52 billion gadget gap was calculated by the average annual spend on gadgets, divided by the average number of unused features, multiplied by the number of households in the UK.
Weird Science Factoid: Close to two million people who go to hospitals in the USA for one ailment wind up catching another. Hospitals are breeding grounds of disease!
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
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