On Monday 9 June Apple CEO Steve Jobs will walk on to the stage at the World Wide Developer Conference and reveal a new version of the iPhone that will totally blow the first away.

It’ll probably have 3G, more storage, support for Bluetooth stereo headphones and a much better digital camera and even video call support. And if current rumours are to be believed, O2 will make it absolutely, totally 100 per cent free. Sorry, how much did you pay for the iPhone again?

As new inventions go though, the iPhone has been kind to early adopters - thanks to incremental software updates that should still make it usable by the time fourth and fifth gen iPhone rolls around.

It’s also suffered few of the reliability problems, bugs and underachieving features that early adopters of other gadgets have had to put up with. We’ll look at those it has in more detail later, but for now let’s take a look some of other hardware and software devices you would have been wise to avoid:

Panasonic DMR-HS1 HDD / DVD recorder

A thousand pounds for what exactly?

In the days before BitTorrent, 4oD and the BBC iPlayer - you had three choices when it came to watching catch-up TV: record to crumbly old VHS, stump up for Sky subscription and get yourself a Sky+ box, or to sweet talk your bank manager into giving you £1,000 for this - the UK’s first DVD / HDD recorder.

Released just five years ago, the DMR-HS1 was cutting-edge for its time - it could record analogue TV to DVD-RAM or DVD-R discs, had a 40GB hard disk and a GUI that looked like it belonged in Windows 1.0. In it way it was marvellous... well for about six months or so until the DVD / HDD recorder market was flooded with rival recorders that could do more for less.

Within two years Panasonic was offering 160GB models that could also play DVD-RW discs, but by then it was way too late - we’d all fallen in love with personal video recorders. Another one for the early adopter attic.

Sony NW-MS70D Network Walkman

With this Atrac codec you are really killing us