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The Worst Tech of Q2 2006

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the top-ten-each-quarter dept.

ClickOnThis writes "CNET has an article on the Worst tech of Q2 2006. Their rogue's gallery includes: Segway Polo, the 'Nyko Intelligent Remote 360', and a dishonorable mention for the HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray format war. My personal (un)favorite is the appropriately-named Pantech 300 mobile phone, which is so small you could almost swallow it. From the article: 'When it's in your hand, you will feel like Gigantor. But it's a trick. You are not Gigantor. And if you're at a monster truck rally, bully convention, or Hell's Angels hangout while you're using it, you'll catch some hell for being Mr. Fancy Li'l Mini Phone. A wedgie, Kick Me sign, or stop-hitting-yourself situation might ensue.'"

33 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Vista by MarkByers · · Score: 5, Funny

    I would have voted for Vista...

    But now it looks like we will have to wait until 2007.

    Yeah, yeah mod me Troll, I don't care this time! :)

    --
    I'll probably be modded down for this...
    1. Re:Vista by moranar · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm voting for Windows Genuine Advantage. Strangely, that did ship on time. On time to what, I'll be buggered if I know.

      --
      "I think it would be a good idea!"
      Gandhi, about Internet Security
  2. I've said it before... by NexFlamma · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... and I'll say it again; Nintendo renaming the 'Revolution' to the 'Wii' was one of the most ingenious strokes of marketing I've ever witnessed. Never before has the name of videogame console been so talked about, argued about and generally advertised to the average (read: non-gamer) person.

    I get the feeling that in the upcoming console war this name change is going to be proof of the old adage "There's no such thing as bad publicity".

    1. Re:I've said it before... by drsquare · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Shouldn't we wait to see how many people actually buy it before calling it ingenious marketing?

    2. Re:I've said it before... by jdbartlett · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The whole list is fluff. Heck, the whole story is fluff! Some of these actually are products that were designed badly (the Kodak camera, for example), but mostly this is a list of products with poor marketing (Wii) or not-products (polo is an event, not a product, and the product in question is fine as far as technology goes).

      The list should be renamed: Things this editor stumbled into 1Q 2006 that he doesn't like, all of which employ technology in some vague way.

    3. Re:I've said it before... by pyrrhonist · · Score: 2, Insightful
      No one wil have troubles saying it in any English-speaking market.

      Wii do you say that?

      --
      Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
    4. Re:I've said it before... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      The Chinese do, but it doesn't make it through the great Firewall.

  3. Gadgets Suck by Umbral+Blot · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's probably a bad sign when gadgets nowadays are so stupid that we need quarterly reports to mock them.

    --

    Philosophy.
  4. Small is bad now? by CosmeticLobotamy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    My phone is smaller than most, and it's still too damn big. I don't use it for anything other than calling people and checking the time, and I don't need it to be big enough to have other functions (not that I don't understand people that do need features and bigness that I don't). I have a lot of crap I need to carry in my pockets, and I don't like having huge, bulging, jagged thighs all the time. I'd pay quite a bit for a truly miniscule phone. Not the one from the article, though, because it's still too big.

    1. Re:Small is bad now? by JanneM · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The review was shorthand for "Pantech didn't send us swag or phones on 'indefinite' loan so here's the payback". The inclusion in the worst list is "They not only didn't send any swag, they even accused us of wanting bribes when we called and complained about it".

      Cnet used to be decent a few years ago; now it's frankly best ignored.

      Oh, and I'd say the Nintendo name change is probably one of the better PR coups this year. Perhaps the reviewers didn't get a free DS Lite either.

      --
      Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
    2. Re:Small is bad now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      How about "worlds smallest mobile phone"
      http://www.vkmobile.com/uk/product/gsm_spec.jsp?pr oduct_idx=322

      I bought mine a month ago and love it. Only 48g, very thin. Easily fits comfortably in shirt pocket or suit pants. And rather cheap also!
      Only con - shorter than average battery capacity.

    3. Re:Small is bad now? by Onan · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yeah, I'm totally perplexed by this. I looked at their "review" of the phone, which is really just a couple of sentences inexplicably listing its smallness as "con". Did they forget about the ability to duct tape bricks to the phone if they have some bizarre desire for it be larger?

      And yes. The phone--not that small. Not nearly small enough.

      The US cellphone market seems to be plagued by two awful things:

      • Carriers have mostly succeeded in tying phone hardware to phone service. So you can't just go out and choose the best phone and then choose the best carrier; you need to try and find some not-awful intersection of the two, and end up with a phone that has had many of its abilities intentionally disabled by the carrier.
      • Once they wrangled phones out of the separate market, carriers decided that they could only advertise ones with lots of features, not just ones that are good at being phones. So they're only selling huge monstrosities with nonsense like cameras, video and audio recording, color displays, multiple displays, games, web browsers, calendars, hard drives, laser printers, and whathaveyou. And they seem completely unwilling to sell something that's just a telephone, which is all I want. As small as humanly possible while still retaining good battery life, and none of that other cruft.
    4. Re:Small is bad now? by wizzat · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Seriously, this article is kindof pathetic. I normally don't comment, but wow. The Polo thing.. maybe a bad idea, but hardly a technology. It sounded more like they were petulantly crying over things they simply didn't like. For instance, there's nothing wrong with a small phone. So your camera takes 8 seconds to boot up... that would hardly make it the WORST tech of Q2 2006. Hey, that wouldn't even get an honorable mention from me! Ah well. At least most of the other articles have been interesting.

    5. Re:Small is bad now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny
      I don't like having huge, bulging, jagged thighs all the time.

      You're American. Get used to it. It's part of your culture.

    6. Re:Small is bad now? by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Carriers have mostly succeeded in tying phone hardware to phone service. So you can't just go out and choose the best phone and then choose the best carrier

      Assuming you have a GSM carrier (Cingular or T-Mob), you *can* move the SIM card to another phone. And there's a glut of "unlocked"[*] phones available on EBay and from online retailers, which will accept any SIM card. With CDMA that Verizon uses, of course, you actually have to *tell* the carrier that you're changing phones, since there aren't swappable SIM cards in that system. The phone that you get with the service? You can unlock the thing with a variety of 3rd party utilities and then sell it yourself on EBay.

      you need to try and find some not-awful intersection of the two, and end up with a phone that has had many of its abilities intentionally disabled by the carrier.

      Again, online retailers to the rescue. You can buy phones from Europe with factory firmware installed. Look for a phone that also does 850 MHz - otherwise you'll have weak signals in some places. The only problem with this approach is that factory firmware sometimes isn't optimised to work well with the carrier - i.e. I used a Siemens SK65 phone with Cingular for a while and you weren't able to set the delay before a call went to voicemail and also voicemail notifications were slightly screwed up. (Good phone otherwise, except for the lack of 850MHz capability!)

      -b.

      [*]- US cell carriers "lock" their phones so they only accept *their* SIM cards until an unlock key is entered or new firmware is loaded. You can generally get the unlock codes from them after your 1- or 2-year initial agreement expires. (Use the excuse that you're going to a remote area of Upper Tadjikistan with no service ;)

  5. steves and segway polo by chrisxkelley · · Score: 2, Funny

    hm.. dont let ballmer join the segway polo team. that'd be one expensive chair when he loses.

  6. can I vote for CNET? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That article was so badly written, I thought it was a digg posting. Is there any journalism left in the eletronic age?

  7. Xbox 360 - Hands Down 'Winner' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    360 Red Lights of Death

    I think the record is up to someone who is on their SEVENTH!!! 360 replacement unit.

    It is bizarre to see 360 owners talk about how lucky they are with only have to have gone through one or two replacement 360s. Or how 'impressed' they were with how quickly Microsoft sent the delivery truck to pickup their dead 360. Boggle. It's like airline passengers bragging about how a certain airline has the best bodybags when confronted with the abysmal safety record of the airline they are flying on.

    The failure rate of the Xbox 360 hardware is so beyond any other piece of electronic hardware it has to be costing Microsoft insane amounts of money to keep the 2 million or so poor sods with 360s from storming the Redmond headquarters. Free games, waving fees for out of warranty failures, insane amount of money on shipping units to and from Microsoft for replacement.

    What is funny about the whole Xbox 360 hardware failure fiasco is after the first Xbox marketplace failure this was the one where Microsoft was supposed to get things right and take over the console world.

    Heh, so much for that plan...

    1. Re:Xbox 360 - Hands Down 'Winner' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The 360 isn't the worst tech of 2006 because of the absurd hardware failure rates.

      It's the worst tech of 2006 because it is a massively overpriced 480p gaming machine that Microsoft is trying to use for 720p. The fucked up 360 graphics system has only 10megs of EDRAM - which is exactly how much you need for 4xAA 480p screen - meaning that developers are forced to either go with almost no AA and have jaggies everywhere(like most 360 games) or implement a tedious to write custom tile renderer just for the 360 version of their game that drags down rendering performance due to all the redundant rendering from overlapping geometry on tile boundaries.

      The 360 is a nightmare for developers.

      It's like Microsoft told ATI, take one of your stock pc graphics cards and fuck it up and make it as difficult as possible for developers to work with.

      * Lack of decent AA - jaggies everywhere
      * Miserable framerates - due to the system trying to render at 720p when it really is only powerful enough to handle 480p
      * Screen tearing - due to developers not being able to maintain a decent framerate at 720p
      * Texture filtering problems - there is an almost complete lack of AF in 360 games - something even old lowend pc graphics cards can handle without a sweat

      You just want to smack your head and roll your eyes and have pity for the poor sods that have to do 360 development.

    2. Re:Xbox 360 - Hands Down 'Winner' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      You have been grossly mis-informed. The embedded memory within the GPU itself a massive benefit to developers. It allows the GPU to do extra graphical work (such as Anti Aliasing) without moving the data back to the GPU's memory (in the case of the 360, the 512MB system memory) - this saves system bandwidth, data retrieval time, and system memory usage. The 10 megs of embedded memory should not be considered a framebuffer. The only other system I'm aware of that has a similar setup is the Flipper in the Gamecube (3MB) - and likely Hollywood in the Wii. No GPU you can purchase for your PC has this, the PS3 does not have this. The GPU itself is more akin to the X1900 from ATI in that theres a unified shader system, which gives developers a lot more freedom (and ultimately more performance since the system wont be waiting for shader pipes to free up) with what is rendered.

      We've not had the 360 on the market for a year, and launch developers had a fraction of the time required to tune their games to the hardware.

      Frankly, the 360's biggest problem (ironically, the same problem area that the PS3 will present) is with the CPU. It has the potential to be an incredibly powerful unit, however programers have to relearn normal program flow to even use it. Splitting a game into (up to) 6 different threads, none of which can issue an out-of-order call, is a monumental headache. The timing required to get things working perfectly will take years to develop. I believe this is where your performance loss, framerate included, is do be found.

    3. Re:Xbox 360 - Hands Down 'Winner' by radish · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Which is interesting, because all the developers I've spoken to (and yes, I do know some actual game developers actually working on these things) rather like the 360.

      --

      ---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"

  8. Futurama did it! by __aalwyc6372 · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Have you swallowed your mobile again?"

  9. Tubenet (Ted Stevens' version of the Internet) by FractalZone · · Score: 3, Funny

    "It's a series of tubes. This amazing network technology enables you to get email from associates in as little as five days! Thankfully, Mr. Stevens is yet-another-confused Congresscritter more interested in pork than in sound public policy.

    --
    "You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
  10. Segway... hey, they laughed at bikers for YEARS... by w4rl5ck · · Score: 5, Interesting

    back in the 19th century.

    I think, the Segway will be my relief when I get old and can't walk as good as now. It should be a nice replacement for those grandma walking aids that must be used these days.

    So, I don't think the segway is a bad thing at all. looks stupid, but hey... %)

  11. A prime example of why I don't read CNET... by Darundal · · Score: 3, Informative

    An article with next to no content, that doesn't even stick to the tech like the headline states...so-so reviews...and an annoying convoluted site design.

  12. Ultra Mobile PC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Recently I have noticed that a lot of review sites review hardware with a specific purpose in mind. The Samsung Q1 UltraMobile devices are great in an educational setting as well as for mobile employees previously tied to a Tablet PC. Still, the complaints from many review sites is basically "This device is not good for this purpose" instead of a simple "The battery options limit the usable time to 2.5 hours". Explore the specifications and any limitations exposed beyond simple spec sheet and leave us with enough knowledge to determine whether the devices will work in our specific situation.

    BTW, a name change is not "worst tech".

  13. Re:Segway... hey, they laughed at bikers for YEARS by mjeffers · · Score: 5, Funny

    I think, the Segway will be my relief when I get old and can't walk as good as now. It should be a nice replacement for those grandma walking aids that must be used these days.

    Now it makes sense. The Segway's market is that large group of elderly people who can't walk long distances but are able to stand for long periods of time.

    "Somewhere between mobility and the Rascal Scooter? Consider Segway!"

  14. I haven't said it before, by mobby_6kl · · Score: 2, Informative

    but I'll say it now; The name change might be good for publicity, but I still find the new name retarded.

  15. Peter swallows phone by bloggin+joe · · Score: 2, Funny

    That mention of that small phone reminds me of the Family Guy episode where Peter, after going over a bump in his car while talking on his cell phone, swallows it, without pushing 'END' first.

  16. Rich folks and their toys/games by eck011219 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Okay, am I the only one who thought the video of Woz was ridiculous? I mean, of course it's ridiculous, but more specifically he goes on at limited but noticable length about how he's so good at this that they keep having to change the rules to minimize his dominance. The interviewer goads him on a bit, but really, he seems pretty conceited throughout the whole interview. I haven't had much experience watching him in the past, so it could be that he's always this way. But good God, the man is playing a full-size version of table hockey, more or less, with minimal expenditure of energy and a silly helmet, and all he can do is brag about how much better he is at it than everyone else.

    All that said, it DOES look like goofy fun. I guess the contrast between the World Cup (twenty-two guys from all over the world and a ball, running their butts off for close to two hours) and this (a bunch of people with lots of resources riding fabulous machines around and whacking at stuff) got to me, though.

    Wait, I just basically described auto racing, too, and I love auto racing. Ah, hells bells, I gotta rethink this one ...

    --
    It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
  17. Killer App by Mignon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Not to take article this seriously, but hopping land mines get my vote for worst tech.

  18. Re:Tagging WTF by Scrameustache · · Score: 4, Funny

    It would be good to be able to completely assess the entire gamut of users opinions.

    If only there were some kind of list of messages containing the opinions of users of slashdot... messages that would be listed like a line, no.. a... a thread. Yes.

    If only you could read the fucking thread. If only.

    --

    You can't take the sky from me...

  19. What a load of shit. by Corngood · · Score: 2, Informative

    They never assumed you would have to fit your whole framebuffer in EDRAM at once, that's why they have predicated tiling. I'm not going to go beyond what info is publicly available, but you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.

    Predicated Tiling