Eleven Gadgets That Died Too Early

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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Gizmodo has compiled a list of eleven of what they consider to be devices that didn’t catch on with the public long enough to become a long-term fond memory. Instead of becoming a classic, they just were discarded and forgotten. See what you think and add to the list if you have an unloved favorite.

Maybe it was poor marketing, an unfounded lack of support, or simply bad timing that did them in, but whatever the case, they died much too soon.
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Dreamcast and maybe Amiga are the only ones that should be on that list.

What should be on that is it the Creative Nomad.. the ones with the HDDs in them.

And at first glance, I read it as "Elven" instead of Eleven.
 
1) Dreamcast

Died because Sega killed it. I couldn't think of a better reason. It wasn't doing badly and it's legacy still continues today.

2) GameGear

Died because of lack of games. Gameboy had such a great library of games but that green/black screen wasn't enough to deter people away from it. Also Pokemon.

3) Zune

Died because Apple was like Nike shoes for people back then. You either had an Apple or you were a loser.

4) Panasonic 3DO

Died because it cost $700 back in the early 90's. That and a lack of games that weren't full motion video. Cause as you can see that shit caught on today. :rolleyes:
 
Amiga and Dreamcast definately.
The Amiga was quirky, had good graphics & sound, plus was a lot more pioneering than its competitors. Sadly, Commodore dropped the ball on it big time.

Dreamcast had some really fun games. Crazy Taxi is probably my favorite.

3DO? Nah. Overpriced. Very few games. The only good game was Star Control (which Toys for Bob released and you can play it on a PC/Mac/maybe linux now).
 
Yeah, Amiga and Dreamcast get's my vote as well. I still have a dreamcast with 20 or so games.....just wish I could find the power cable. :eek:
 
I have very fond memories of my Goldstar 3DO, and Atari Lynx II. Still have both of them, but the screen cracked on the Lynx. :mad:
 
cyclone3d said:
What should be on that is it the Creative Nomad.. the ones with the HDDs in them.
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yep, i had one of those 20gb things. people were like "hurr durr why do you need so much music with you". then everyone bought an ipod when it came out because it suddenly was cool. though, like all creative products the build quality was garbage and it broke way too easy. two broke in the two years of warranty. i've had only problems with creative products... (speakers, the nomad and the driver support of their sound cards).
 
Funny, I still have a functioning GameGear (eats batteries quicker than a kid after haloween), Nomad (never did swap out the HDD) and 1st Gen Zune (that still locks up every four years due to the leap year bug). I still use the Zune regularly.
 
Stoly said:
hmm the same applies today
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Not really. Apple is constantly losing market share in the smart phone area. stand alone mp3 players have died off. Zune now lives in the form of windows phones. Android would have their form of music player and of course iphones have replaced ipods.

Android phones have more market shares than Apple phones by a large percent, however Apple sells more apps on their platform than android platforms do.

Looking at smartphone OS percentages. Android is 84.7%, Apple is 11.7%, windows phone is 2.5%.
 
SonicTron said:
Dreamcast also died partly due to the ridiculous ease of piracy
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That was only part of the issue. The main thing was that the execs bankrupted the company making it. They were already losing to Nintendo and didn't have a lot of money and yet thought it best to created two teams to create a new console and had them compete. First one to finish their console was the one that went to market, the other was going to be scrapped. That means twice as much R&D as normal. From what I heard the other one was far better than the Dreamcast and was only a week behind finishing.

So they went to market with the quickest, not the best, they could toss together in R&D and weren't able to stay in business then long enough to let it do well. From its ashes though we got the Xbox.
 
temujin987 said:
3do on the list? gotta be kidding me
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My mind was blown the first time I saw Need For Speed on the 3DO back in 94'. It was a 3DO exclusive at that point. That feeling wasn't trumped for at least several months when the PlayStation came out. Sure it was expensive, but it was a hell of a console at the time.
 
Exavior said:
That was only part of the issue. The main thing was that the execs bankrupted the company making it. They were already losing to Nintendo and didn't have a lot of money and yet thought it best to created two teams to create a new console and had them compete. First one to finish their console was the one that went to market, the other was going to be scrapped. That means twice as much R&D as normal. From what I heard the other one was far better than the Dreamcast and was only a week behind finishing.

So they went to market with the quickest, not the best, they could toss together in R&D and weren't able to stay in business then long enough to let it do well. From its ashes though we got the Xbox.
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I have a feeling some part of that is BS. Sega isn't the smarted company in the world but I seriously doubt they'd put a significantly inferior model to market because it was done one week earlier.
 
Dreamcast was ahead of it's time. It's a shame the PS2 hype machine basically killed it off. I also liked my Zune a lot. I still have a Zune HD sitting in my desk drawer. Unfortunately, I can't really justify using it since my phone does everything it does plus a ton more.
 
Had both an iPod and a Zune, the Zune was far superior in Audio quality, HOWEVER, the Creative Zen was my favorite MP3 player at that time, better pricing, better sound quality than the Zune, software was easy to use. I really dislike how people would buy the iPod thinking the sound quality was better than the cheaper Zune and Zen.
 
I see the Sega Gamegear and other less than spectacular handhelds mentioned...

What about the Sega Nomad? It was the handheld Genesis. I still have one.

The Gamegear screen was just sad, and while I did have one for a while, It really wasn't all that good.
 
PCunicorn said:
I have a feeling some part of that is BS. Sega isn't the smarted company in the world but I seriously doubt they'd put a significantly inferior model to market because it was done one week earlier.
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I was trying to find something to back that up. I just recall reading that back around the release of the dreamcast. It might be possible that my memory is a little fuzzy and it was a little more than a week, but from what I recall it wasn't a very long time frame, less than a month. But now I am having trouble find much in the way of that. Just that they were working on two systems at the same time.

I know that Nintendo did a similar thing with the virtual boy. They had two teams, the other system again would have been better, it would have been full color instead of just red. But again it was a few months behind the other one so it got scrapped as again they wanted the first one to finish a working prototype to be the one that went to market.

felt said:
Had both an iPod and a Zune, the Zune was far superior in Audio quality, HOWEVER, the Creative Zen was my favorite MP3 player at that time, better pricing, better sound quality than the Zune, software was easy to use. I really dislike how people would buy the iPod thinking the sound quality was better than the cheaper Zune and Zen.
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no different than people going from a 20 MP camera to a 1MP on the iPhone and thinking it was far superior in quality.
 
I loved my 3DO as well and let me tell you, that $700 price tag is what killed it. No one wanted to make games for a system that wasn't going to sell in mass. There were some great games like The Horde, Captain Quazar, D&D Slayer, Road Rash, Crash N Burn, Wolfenstein 3d, Doom, and Star Control 2. Not many of those were exclusives and none really looked THAT MUCH better on other consoles to justify buying a 3DO.
In comparison, the only reason the NeoGeo did as well as it did was because it could be configured for home or arcade use, and I saw plenty in arcades back in the day. Hell, I STILL see the occasional NeoGeo at the occasional pizza place.
 
I thought some of the mini-laptops, before tablets came out, should have done better.
 
The Amiga belongs on the list.

I had a ReplayTV - it got sued into debt it couldn't overcome, but it truly beat out the TiVo in UI. Its automatic commercial skip and show-sharing with other ReplayTV owners were both ahead of their time and what got them sued out of existence. Mine got used until HDTV became relatively standard then I gave it to a relative who used it until its guide service went offline.

I think I sold one or two Newtons back in the day, just like I sold maybe one AT&T eO.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EO_Personal_Communicator

Newton was ahead of its time, but too far ahead; they couldn't give it the handwriting recognition capabilities it truly needed during that time period, and the price was prohibitive, though CEOs would have probably gone for it if #1 could be achieved. Cellular bandwidth wasn't good enough yet for the eO, nor was minniaturization tech, processor speeds, or battery life. Both should have died, and did, just like the MiniDisc --Sony's proprietary formats and licensing doomed them, along with the digital (non-media-based) market, though I sold a few MiniDisc players too.

GameGear's battery life was poor enough to see a number of them returned. Otherwise, it might have been amazing.

3DO didn't garner enough title support and some of the titles stunk; sales were dismal.
 
> GameGear

> Died because of lack of games.

also its abyssmal battery life.
 
LoneWolf said:
3DO didn't garner enough title support and some of the titles stunk; sales were dismal.
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Another thing that killed it was there really wasn't a ratings system yet, well there sort of was but it was voluntary...
And the 3DO had quite a few adult games, like with nudity. It was a real turn off for parents to see half the titles behind glass with "Not for children" stickers on them. And back then, gaming was still viewed as a "kid thing."
 
My first zune died a long time ago but I still use my Zune HD that I got on release day like almost every day.
 
steakman1971 said:
3DO? Nah. Overpriced. Very few games. The only good game was Star Control (which Toys for Bob released and you can play it on a PC/Mac/maybe linux now).
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Two games! :p Wing Commander 3 was pretty great on 3DO. The live action cutscenes even look better than PC versions now. Yet I've read there is even a mod to implement the 3DO cutscenes into the PC version.
 
Way of the Warrior was awesome.. I remember getting my Panasonic FZ-1 upon the first price drop.

The way that the 3DO Company actually didn't actually manufacture the hardware and licensed it out to 3rd parties contributed to its high price point. The PlayStation wasn't even out yet.. and actually the 3DO Company had talked to Sony about them being a manufacturer of the 3DO... but Sony was already in the process of working on the PlayStation.
 
PCunicorn said:
I have a feeling some part of that is BS. Sega isn't the smarted company in the world but I seriously doubt they'd put a significantly inferior model to market because it was done one week earlier.
Click to expand...

Need I remind you of the Sega CD and 32X?
'Nuff said. ;)
 
I had an Amiga, but honestly, it was destined to fail. It was a generation beyond what "PC-clones" could do at the time, but went "PCs" finally got VGA graphics as more of a standard instead of a luxury then the Amiga was on it's way out, especially considering that the PC side of things had more 3rd party expansion options. I want to upgrade the graphics in the Amiga how do I do that? Hard drive? Oh yeah toss this sidecar on (I had one with a 20megabyte, not a typo, hard drive that I paid close to $1200 for... *ugh*). I also wasn't a huge fan of needing more chip ram (fast ram) and in order to do that you soldered over two pads on your mother board to bump it up from 512k to 1MB...
Don't get me wrong with MS DOS there were also quite a few tricks to get the "right ram" for a particular game all because of that 640k ceiling but still.

It had a good run, but it died because there was no where to go with it.
 
sfsuphysics said:
I had an Amiga, but honestly, it was destined to fail. It was a generation beyond what "PC-clones" could do at the time, but went "PCs" finally got VGA graphics as more of a standard instead of a luxury then the Amiga was on it's way out, especially considering that the PC side of things had more 3rd party expansion options. I want to upgrade the graphics in the Amiga how do I do that? Hard drive? Oh yeah toss this sidecar on (I had one with a 20megabyte, not a typo, hard drive that I paid close to $1200 for... *ugh*). I also wasn't a huge fan of needing more chip ram (fast ram) and in order to do that you soldered over two pads on your mother board to bump it up from 512k to 1MB...
Don't get me wrong with MS DOS there were also quite a few tricks to get the "right ram" for a particular game all because of that 640k ceiling but still.

It had a good run, but it died because there was no where to go with it.
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Was it a Connor HDD?
Those things were built to last.

It's amazing what the cost of computer systems were back in the 1980s.
Even in the 1990s, the Quadra 950 with far lesser specs in my sig started at $8500 for the base model. :eek:
 
Died too early does not mean it failed. It is not an objective way to look at things. Amiga certainly did not fail. How can a computer that inspired and offered thousands of games and programs be a failure?
 
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