The Worst Tech of Q2 2006

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.'"

Comments

Vista

[MarkByers]

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've said it before...

[NexFlamma]

... 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".

Gadgets Suck

[Umbral Blot]

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

Xbox 360 - Hands Down 'Winner'

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Xbox 360 - Hands Down 'Winner'

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Small is bad now?

[Onan]

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.

Futurama did it!

[__aalwyc6372]

"Have you swallowed your mobile again?"

Segway... hey, they laughed at bikers for YEARS...

[w4rl5ck]

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... %)

Re:Segway... hey, they laughed at bikers for YEARS

[mjeffers]

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!"