Most useless gadgets of all time
Expensive, poorly made, badly conceived (and that’s just the article). Gadgets that are just, well, crap
All too often, the latest gadget is a solution looking for a problem. Here are the 10 most useless computer gizmos all time. We’ve listed the products in only a rough order (although our number one most useless product is a belter), and we’ve given each a uselessness score out of five in which one could be conceivably of some use, and five is a chocolate tea pot.
10. Nokia N-Gage
One to consign to the pile of ‘a good idea done wrong’. We now know that there is a market for portable gaming devices that are also smartphones. Nokia’s mistake was to add phone capability to a games console, rather than gamifying a smartphone. The result was useless: pretend to make a phone call on your Wii and you will get the idea.
The N-Gage cost £75 more than Nintendo’s Game Boy, had few titles to play on it, and looked awful both as a console and as a smartphone. Awful, and useless.
DivX Enhanced DVD Players
An example of good tech ruined by bad policies. DivX means something benign these days, but back in 1998 the Digital Video Express moniker was originally appended to an effort to create ‘disposable’ timelimited DVDs that could stop DVD rental discs being pirated. DivX players may have had a chance if they were free, or at least cheaper than standard DVD players. But no, DivX ‘enhanced’ DVD players costs a lot more than standard DVD players, and required you to attach a telephone line in order to play a rental disc. This was enough to kill DivX at a time when most households needed their phone lines to make calls.
What made it a fate worse than death was the early privacy concerns customers had about faceless corporations tracking what they watched. Why worry about that, huh?
How would you describe something that costs more to hobble a standard product? One word: useless.
Datawind PocketSurfer2
My personal favourite. And another idea poorly executed, and very badly timed.
Picture the scene: it’s mid-2007, and the internet is primarily a desktop affair. Plenty of people are still on dial-up, and even those with home broadband tend to be tied to a desktop via ethernet cables. Even getting a web connection to your home is a complicated and expensive business. Tech-savvy mobile communicators tend to carry BlackBerries, and the mobile internet consists of scratching around for football scores and cinema listings via WAP.
The PocketSurfer2 offered a solution to these problems. A phone without the ability to make calls, it was a mobile cellular internet device. A smartphone-sized pocket book with a qwerty keyboard that purported to offer the full internet on the go, as well as a dedicated email device. Websites were crunched through a special caching process that meant they required very little data to be pulled down. Better yet there were no contracts entered into, DataWind said. You simply paid a one-off fee, and accepted adverts when you booted and shut down your PocketSurfer2.
In a world in which the mobile internet seemed positively futuristic, it was an impressive pitch, so what went wrong? Well for one thing the device failed to live up to expectation. I had one for a year and it was replaced – free of charge, I grant you – no fewer than three times. The third time it fell to pieces, I chucked it in a drawer and forgot about it. I might have persisted, but there was another problem: in order for cellular connectivity to be free DataWind needed sufficient users to make the advertising model work. And, well, it didn’t have them. So in order to keep pocket surfing I needed to shell out for a subscription.
Frankly, the experience wasn’t worth it. Anyone who used a PocketSurfer2 rapidly came to the conclusion that whatever it was – and it was a decent emailer – it was nothing like the full internet. What it was might have been enough, however, were it not for the timing issue. Because the PocketSurfer2 launched just after the iPhone, and although it limped on for a year or two, it was finished.
A big promise unfulfilled. An iPhone rival that was anything but. Poorly made, awful to use. Useless.
NEC Pro Mobile 200
The history of Microsoft and mobile is a paeon to the useless. Lest we forget Microsoft touted the tablet form factor long before the iPad was created, and it has been trying to get mobile Windows off the tarmac for a decade or more.
The NEC Mobile Pro 200 was one of nearly two dozen Windows CE 1.0 devices launched in 1996. Not only did it not support Microsoft’s newly released Outlook, it didn’t work with any non-Microsoft PIM or email client. Win CE 1.0 handhelds were quickly rendered obsolete by Win CE 2.0 devices, which eventually turned into Pocket PCs and Windows Mobile phones.