In five years as PCMag.com's phone analyst, I've reviewed more than 500 products. Some have been excellent. Some have been awful. And some have been really interesting failures, the kinds of things that were just a twist or turn away from success. (Read my previous column for a list of true successes.)
Interesting failures are just as fun to review as fabulous successes, because they show ways the world didn't go. Maybe somewhere out there is an alternate reality where no parent would dare send her six-year-old to first grade without a phone to call Mom, or one where small startup companies can bring cool phones to the U.S. market, or one where geeks get a wireless carrier that fulfills all of their high-tech dreams.
None of those worlds are our world, though. That said, I found five products over the past five years that are peeking through from those alternate realities. Do you remember other fascinating failures? Tell me in Talkbacks below.
My top five failures:
Helio Kickflip. Helio was probably the biggest letdown of my five years in mobile. At first, it was supposed to be a new wireless carrier that brought super-powered Asian phones to geeks—hooray! Then they scrapped that whole idea in favor of bringing midrange Asian phones to some demographic they couldn't quite identify. Uh, yay. Its first phone, the Kickflip, didn't actually work. The Helio Ocean worked brilliantly, but by that point, the whole edifice was crumbling. To this day, no carrier has taken up the mantle of offering super-powered phones to geeks in the USA.
Curitel Identity. The first mass-market Linux phone, with fabulous personality-shifting technology and removable covers that actually contained software, the Identity was a perfect example getting slapped down by the way our market works. First, it took the inventors years to find a manufacturer that would build it. Then, when they sealed a deal with Korean manufacturer Curitel, the big wireless carriers wouldn't even look at their product. The Identity vanished, and nothing has ever been quite like it.
Sony Mylo (both the first and second versions). Sony's insane internal structure sometimes results in insane products. For instance: I assume Sony isn't allowed to make cell phones, because only Sony Ericsson can make cell phones. So Sony made the Mylo, which makes calls with Skype over Wi-Fi networks. The Mylo's complete failure shows that if you're selling a communications tool nowadays, it better connect everywhere—and that means having a cellular radio on board. (The iPod touch gets away with being Wi-Fi only, in my mind, by being an iPod and gaming device first.)
Motorola ROKR E1. The first iTunes phone was a hideous disaster and a warning to the rest of the industry that Apple doesn't play well with others. The ROKR started out late, with the launch so poorly managed that a bunch of press were shipped to Miami to see a phone that was yanked from the podium days before it was supposed to appear. When Apple actually launched the ROKR, it took away its thunder within minutes by introducing the iPod nano on its heels. The E1 itself was an uninspiring paste-job, slapping a crippled version of iTunes onto an existing midrange Motorola phone. It almost looked like Apple wanted this phone (and the whole idea of non-Apple products running iTunes) to fail.
LG Migo. For a brief moment in 2005, a bunch of manufacturers were selling cell phones to six year olds. This may sound crazy, but I think there are safety-related reasons for giving little kids simple devices with which they can call Mom or Dad. Apparently, I am the only person who thinks so, because the whole product category has basically vanished. Hysterical news reports from the UK about how cell phones will boil a small child's brain didn't help, even though these kiddy phones were meant to be used for only a few minutes at a time. (story Link)
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