Personal electronics

Personal electronics was the remainder of the small-electronics department after GPS, headsets, shavers, and clock radios had their own names. Pocket radios, small recorders, and similar single-purpose devices landed here.

These machines are defined by a battery and a single job. A voice recorder that files audio on internal memory fills up and then refuses a new take until something is deleted. The file format is often a proprietary wrapper or a plain WAV, and only one of those opens on a computer without the maker's software. Button-cell clocks and thin LED lights from the same kind of row die when the cell is left in past its date and it leaks. If a device from this shelf has a USB charge port, the port is usually power in, not a way to drag the files off.