There have been loads of tech products announced over the
years, generating various levels of excitement. A few succeed, most fail, and
some never even make it across the starting line. We’ve crafted a list of
exciting tech products that caught the public imagination with a flurry of
press releases, prototypes, or teaser reveals — only to evaporate in the heat
of their own hype.
APPLE’S
AIRPOWER WIRELESS CHARGER
In September last year,
Apple unveiled the iPhone
X, iPhone
8, and iPhone
8 Plus making a big deal out of their ability to charge wirelessly. We
also caught a brief glimpse of a new Apple wireless charging mat called
AirPower, which was touted for an early 2018 release. The mat was shown
charging an iPhone X, an Apple Watch, and a set of AirPods simultaneously, but
it seems Apple may have bitten off more than it can chew.
Here we are more than
halfway through 2018 and the AirPower mat is nowhere to be seen. WWDC 2018 came
and went and Apple has remained silent on the subject. But we’re not ready to
count this one out just yet. There’s still a chance it will reappear alongside
this year’s iPhones in September, but if that event comes and goes without any
AirPower news, the charging mat could slip into the realm of the quietly
forgotten like the rest of our list.
SEGA
VR HEADSET
Back in 1991, when Sega was
on top of the world riding the wave of the Genesis’ (Mega Drive) success, it
rashly announced a virtual reality headset. The product wasn’t shown off until
a couple of years later when it was revealed that Sega VR would sell for $200,
work with the Genesis, and come with four games on release. It was pushed back
and then canceled after prototypes induced motion sickness and severe headaches
in testers.
Despite Sega VR being dead
and buried, Nintendo pushed forward with the Virtual Boy, which was released in
1995 and flopped spectacularly, burying the idea of virtual reality for almost
20 years until its recent resurrection. The best VR
headset today (the HTC Vive) boasts twin OLED displays with a
resolution of 2,160 x 1,200 pixels. Sega VR had color LCDs with a 320 x
200-pixel resolution.
GOOGLE’S
PROJECT ARA SMARTPHONE
The idea of a modular
smartphone generated a lot of excitement when Motorola announced it back in
2013. Why upgrade your phone every year to get a better camera or a bigger
battery when you can just buy an individual component upgrade and slot it into
your existing phone? Google had just acquired the phonemaker back then and
looked ready to throw its weight behind the project, which was first shown off
at Google I/O in 2014.
Although slotting together
your dream phone like a collection of Lego bricks appealed to some people, it
proved difficult to realize. Different concepts and hints at the involvement of
big manufacturers came to nothing and Google shelved the project in 2016. A
watered-down version of the idea eventually appeared in the shape of Moto Mods.
Ethical smartphone maker Fairphone has also pursued the idea with its
modular Fairphone
2, and LG made an attempt with the LG G5,
but we’ve yet to see a big modular smartphone success.
PHANTOM
GAME CONSOLE
The video game industry is
good at generating enormous levels of hype and excitement and then delivering
massive disappointment, but few have scaled the heights of the Phantom game
console. Infinium Labs announced the Phantom in 2003, promising a console that
would outperform the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. The marketing babble was
suspiciously devoid of details, but the central idea hinged around a
good-looking console with PC innards capable of offering games on-demand,
downloadable from the internet for subscribers.
It was originally supposed
to be released in 2003 for $400 with a $10 per month subscription for games,
but it was pushed back again and again until the company removed any mention of
it from its website in 2006. Valve eventually realized something close to the
idea with Steam Machines, announced in 2013 and released in 2015, but even with
the might of Steam behind it the platform floundered and has now all
but disappeared.
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