Some tech flops are famous and well documented: Microsoft Bob. The Segway scooter. The Iridium satellite cellphone. (You think you’ve got indoor-reception problems with your current cellphone? How’d you like a phone with $8 a minute airtime charges that doesn’t work at all without a line of sight to the sky?)

Other dogs came and went so fast, they’re now completely forgotten, lost among the dust bunnies of consumer-tech history. For those of us in the tech-review business, however, these flopperoos live on as painful memories—and cautionary tales.

Olympus M:Robe (2004). “It’s a camera. It’s a music player,” said the narrator of Olympus’s $5 million SuperBowl commercial. Unfortunately, it was buggy and horrible at both tasks. Olympus took the M:Robe off the market the following year.

(Even the name didn’t work. M:Robe was meant to be short for “Music Wardrobe.” Okay, what?)

Akimbo (2005). It was the Hulu concept, years before Hulu: a set-top box that was supposed to deliver any TV show, any time, from over the Internet.

The first problem was pricing: you had to pay not only for the box, but also a monthly subscription fee as well as a per-show price.

The second was selection: American TV companies, terrified by what the Internet had done to the music industry, refused to participate. As a result, the Akimbo’s TV-show catalog included such gems as AdvenTV, “the first on-demand Turkish station in the U.S.,” Veg TV (“vegetarian cooking instruction”) and Skyworks, “helicopter flights over the most spectacular landscapes of Britain.” (The entire list of sports categories was this: Billiards, Extreme Sports, Golf, Martial Arts, Documentaries and Yachting.)

Vulkano box (2010). The dream of a do-everything set-top TV box lives on with the Vulkano box, which was intended to do both what a TiVo does (record TV onto a hard drive for playback later) and what a Slingbox does (let you watch your recordings while away from home, over the Internet).

Unfortunately, the original box could not auto-record a favorite show each week; required laymen to reprogram their network routers with port forwarding; locked up if you tried to scroll the TV guide grid; could rewind or fast-forward at only one speed; and required you to specify in advance, at the time of programming a recording, what device you intended to play it on later (iPod Touch/iPhone, iPad, Droid, Mac, PC, TV and so on).

The company acknowledged that it had some work to do. But in the meantime, the poor slobs who paid $380 to buy the Vulkano box had no way of knowing that they were volunteering to be unpaid beta testers.

1 Comments

1. 1. violinconcerto 04:48 AM 6/24/11

   Good collection of gadget failures. Just to add some more interesting items to this list, how about Microsoft's WebTV device in the 90s, or John Bentley's Viewcall set-top-boxes from the UK, in the mid-90s?
   These seem to be very good ideas but might have come to the market too early (causes may be low internet penetration, narrow bandwidth, slow processors, missing standards, and consequently, no real market demand for these multi-capable devices)

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