GEAR Pro Professional 7.03 - No Frills and No Thrills Makes GEAR a Dull Toy

So what does $99.95 give you that the competition wouldn't, for the same price or less? To be fair, not very much. The target audience of GEAR PRO Professional 7.03 does not appear to be your average user. There are certain scripting abilities that make this software much more suited to users who are interested in duplicating original creations, rather than managing their purchased disks.

Supported formats have some flexibility with the inclusion of WMV-HD and dual-layer DVD9 formats, but GEAR still lacks support for HD-DVD or Blu-ray, both of which have gradually gained in popularity (though it appears Blu-ray won that contest).

The continuing lack of ability of the application to accommodate copy-protected disks would seem to be GEAR's undoing, as users who want to back up protected disks will need third-party software to rip the disk, and then GEAR to burn it. Not a huge deal, but the asking price of $99.95 is more than most consumers will want to spend.

The setup was as easy as could be expected. There's little configuration necessary for either the install or the actual setup of the application. [See Image 1]

Besides the lack of support for copy-protected disks, there's nothing taking points away from GEAR PRO more than its user interface. [See Image 2] One can admire a company that's trying to stay bleeding-edge so much that they can't invest much in design, but GEAR's rather basic feature set makes its lack of a more usable design even more unacceptable. The Explorer-like interface is reminiscent of the Windows 98 days--traditional and easy to follow, but not attractive to new users who just spent $99.95.

Now that we know GEAR PRO's shortcomings, what features do they feel justify the hefty pricetag of Professional 7.03? The ability to burn both single and multilayer disks is nice, but again, to support the costly multilayer disks, why not include support for the costly HD-DVD or Blu-ray disks?

Additionally, the basic abilities to create pre-configured DVDs or CDs are as minimal as I've seen in a commercial application. What can be said for GEAR is that their features are professional--the more I analyze it, the more I get the feeling that this application is geared more towards companies and professionals than average users. Disk verification and the ability to easily burn multiple copies are useful features for people needing to make a lot of copies, but not very useful for average users. The scripting capabilities will allow users to automate the process as much as possible without having to buy an even more expensive disk duplicator.