Gallery

Ten tech flops of 2009

Posted on 31 Dec 2009 at 10:00

We count down the ten most disappointing products, technologies and companies of 2009

At the start of each year we always look ahead with great optimism and hope. Hope that the next year will bring technology to solve our knottiest problems and make our working lives easier. And 2009 has brought us some notable successes.

But, inevitably, some companies, technologies and particularly products, have pulled the rug from beneath our optimistic step, dulled our bright-eyed enthusiasm and generally proved crushingly disappointing. Here, we list our top (or rather bottom) ten of the year...

1) The Palm Pre
Announced at CES to much salivation, it took an astonishing ten months for the Palm Pre in the UK. But it wasn't the delay that made the Pre such a crushing disappointment, or the fact that, in the meantime, Android went around quietly stealing all of its hard-earned thunder. It was the fact that, even given all that time, the hardware failed to live up to the hype. Plasticky, with an edge like a cheese wire and with stamina Mr Muscle would be ashamed of, the Palm Pre could, and should have been so much more.

We'd rather... use a Windows Mobile smartphone

2) The Amazon Kindle International
We awaited the second coming of the Kindle eBook reader with the sort of wide-eyed enthusiasm normally reserved for young children opening presents on Christmas morning. Finally, UK readers could download books directly to the device, from wherever they were, simply by running a keyword search. But once the oohs and aahs had subsided and we'd stopped dribbling inanely over its gorgeous looks, a terrible, black feeling of disappointment began to set in. The realisation slowly began to dawn that the Amazon bookstore was, in a word, vapid, being mainly populated with self-help manuals, study guides and ghost-written biographies by Z-list celebrities. Poor show Amazon.

We'd rather... go to Waterstones and buy a Barbara Cartland novel

3) Google Android ... on netbooks
At number three in the list is a surprising entry – haven't Android phones been a big hit in 2009? Well, yes, but one development had us completely nonplussed - Android on a netbook. It sounded as if it might be a good: Android's simplicity and an interface designed to make the most of small screens. The reality, however, was about as exciting as eating dry Weetabix. Installed as a dual boot option on Acer's underwhelming Aspire One D250 netbook, the version of Android was a flat-out port, with little thought to customisation. But worse was to come: access to the Android Market was missing - so you couldn't improve things – and even the inclusion of a version of Mozilla Firefox couldn't mask the fact that Android wasn't designed with a laptop trackpad in mind.

We'd rather... go back to using Windows 95

4) Fancy touchpads
One craze we thoroughly disapprove of that has taken pernicious hold over the past 12 months is "innovative" touchpads on laptops. These have taken various forms and almost all of them have been unutterably awful. Apple, surprisingly, has been the driving force behind this erroneous fervour, introducing its weird, clicky multitouch trackpads across the whole of the MacBook range. They seemed like a good idea at first, but the experience of clicking, dragging and dropping felt about as sensible as standing behind an incontinent elephant with a rumbling stomach. Its imitators were far worse: Dell's engineers had a design aberration when it decided to integrate right and left mouse buttons into the corners of the trackpad on its Mini 10v, and HP had a similar nightmare with its Envy range of top-end laptops – so named, presumably, because that's what owners feel when they see colleagues breaking out their ThinkPads.

We'd rather... use a trackball covered in grease

5) Sony P Series
The laptop market was going through the doldrums when the Asus Eee PC came along and shook things up in late 2007. Shortly after everyone decided that netbooks were a great idea, Sony – with the arrogance of the playground bully, pledged it would never join the "race to the bottom", and its first stab at a netbook-like device seemed to confirm that attitude. The P Series was a limp glove slapped disdainfully in the face of common sense, a truly ridiculous piece of willy-waving – almost entirely impractical, overhyped and overpriced. It ran Windows Vista extremely slowly. It boasted a rather silly 9in widescreen with a completely daft resolution of 1,600 x 768. And it cost an outrageous £750. The P Series was a machine (we hesitate to call it a netbook, let alone a laptop) purely for those with more money than brain cells. Shame on you, Sony.

We'd rather... lug an IBM mainframe around with me

6) Windows Phone (aka Windows Mobile 6.5)
Windows Mobile has been going so long that, if it were human, it would be claiming a free bus pass by now. But as it geriatrically made its way to the Post Office to collect its pension this autumn, it was accosted, dragged unceremoniously into a cheap beauty salon and tarted up. The makeover that Microsoft gave it, unsurprisingly, was more Changing Rooms than Gok Wan, and after initially positive first impressions, the lippy started to smudge and the foundation flake away, revealing the same old liver spots, wrinkles and saggy skin of old. Even the addition of a new application store, and the launch of a free backup service, failed to lift it out of the doldrums. Suffice it to say, we weren't impressed, and neither were most consumers, and in the ensuing months the march of rival operating systems has continued unabated. We'd like to say we're looking forward to the coming of Windows Mobile 7, but if this effort is anything to go by, nothing short of a miracle is needed to arrest the decline of Microsoft's mobile OS.

We'd rather... use Del Boy's Yuppie phone

7) App stores ... on anything but a phone
The unrelenting bandwagonism of the technology industry reached new heights this year, with not only smartphones, but devices in other sectors attempting to cash in on the iPhone's success. The result? App stores in everything from printers to internet radios. Lexmark's Interact S605 printer boasted community apps you could push from its website to your printer. The Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch had few tools to download. Even the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen offered extra apps to install from its website. Did any of these really benefit users, though? Alas most apps for these devices have so far proved frivolous and, in the worst case – the Pure Sensia internet radio – the introduction of fancy apps and the interface required to implement them half-crippled the device.

We'd rather... install Photoshop CS 4 on a Commodore 64

8) Mobile broadband
In a world where processing power keeps improving, PCs gain ever more graphical oomph and storage space, and the internet becomes ever more pervasive, mobile broadband is going backwards. We rightly lauded the spread of cheap, convenient internet access anywhere in 2008, but in 2009, the popularity of the technology and the incapacity of the networks to react combined to drag speeds through the mud. Research conducted by Broadband Genie revealed the average speed to be a nail-draggingly frustrating 0.87Mbits/sec, with others predicting imminent mobile broadband meltdown. In the meantime, consumers are getting a raw deal, with speeds claimed by the networks far from the reality of life on the ground. The future of reliable, fast wire-free broadband for all looks bleak.

We'd rather... trap our dongle in a car door

9) Nvidia's desktop graphics cards
After years of engaging in tit-for-tat dogfights at the top end of the desktop graphics card market, things have taken an unusual twist of late. Instead of immediately wresting control back from ATI's Radeon HD 5000 series and building on the performance of its excellent GTX cards, Nvidia chose to concentrate instead on getting its nettop and netbook-friendly Ion platform out of the door, improving its laptop chipsets and developing its 3D products, while abandoning the desktop market to its rival for the latter half of 2009. Hostilities will inevitably resume when Nvidia's "computer on a chip" Fermi cards hit the market, but for now the only choice for PC gaming enthusiasts is ATI.

We'd rather... play Horace Goes Skiing

10) Mozilla Firefox
It used to be the browser that everyone imitated, but this year looks to have been the year it all started to go down the toilet for Firefox. Three members of the PC Pro team have already abandoned the browser in favour of the simpler and quicker Google Chrome. Even our very own Barry Collins – a former FireFox stalwart – has been caught complaining about how things appear to be heading. It nags you to upgrade, it nags you to update your extensions on a seemingly daily basis, and these quotidian queries delay start-up times intolerably. And with Google introducing extensions for Chrome, we suspect the trickle of deserters will turn into a flood during 2010.

We'd rather... use Chrome instead

Author: Jonathan Bray