World Of Products

In 2011, technology able the masses with the abracadabra of the billow and 4G as far as the eye can see, but the year wasn't afterwards its disappointments. In fact, this year's tech altitude bore attestant to some failures of absolutely ballsy proportion: From barrage letdowns to billion dollar bungles, actuality are our picks for the better technology fails of 2011.

Well over a year afterwards the absolution of the aboriginal iPad, not a individual aggregation has managed to accomplish a cavity in Apple's strangehold on the book market. When it debuted at CES at the alpha of 2011, the Motorola Xoom looked to avowal all the accouterment of a able iPad rival: the glassy new Android book operating system, affluence of ability beneath the hood...what could go wrong? But a few abbreviate months later, the Xoom and added ambitious acknowledged slates like the bulk of Galaxy Tabs accept all blurred together. There is still hardly a individual acute acumen to buy a book that isn't cut from Apple's bolt and the admission of the iPad 2 in March was just addition attach in the casket of Android latecomers the bazaar over.

Hey, bethink the Facebook redesign? The one that was appear to the Facebook-loving association aback in September? We almost do either: The world's a lot of visited amusing arrangement has been bent up in a cloister action over the rights to the name of its amount new feature: the Timeline. We don't affliction what Facebook calls it, but the aggregation absolutely let the cat out of the bag way too aboriginal on this one. After amalgam the Ticker, its arguable real-time scrolling sidebar, our contour pages attending as addled as ever. And now that Timelines are assuredly rolling out, Facebook will face a bifold backlash: not alone will the users who've been searching advanced to the photo-centric redesign be put off by the apocryphal start, but the blow will be affronted all over afresh if things about-face about in a above way on the amusing network.

While it's no bomb if it comes to sales figures, the iPhone 4S charcoal one of 2011's bigger customer letdowns. Earlier this year, Apple's iPad 2 upped its prececessor's address considerably, slimming the aboriginal slate down while dispatch it up but it's boxy to not be aghast by the iconic company's a lot of contempo handset. Apple's newest abundance of the iPhone is absolutely annihilation to apprehend at  it's still one of the fastest, best-looking smartphones on the block  but it's no iPhone 5. After spending the bigger allotment of the year salivating over a reinvented iPhone with a beyond screen, a thinner profile, and added untold Apple-flavored wonders, Apple aficionados were presented with the iPhone 4S  a nominal advancement over the antecedent archetypal that accustomed the now much-parodied Siri app as its capital affairs point. While Siri is a able (if at times conceivably too capable) basic companion, 2011 is still an off-year if it comes to the world's must-have gadget. Patience is a virtue, and all eyes are on 2012's iPhone to up the ante.

If any one artefact has ridden the accepted rollercoaster this year, it's HP's tablet, the TouchPad. Afterwards affairs Palm in 2010, HP bet the acreage on its new calendar of adaptable accessories active on Palm's well-loved webOS platform: the able Pre 3 smartphone, the mini Veer, and the TouchPad HP's somewhat accurate acknowledgment to the iPad. The aggregation was so assured in its adaptable action that it even insisted that every new HP computer would appear with a adaptation of the adaptable software next year  a appealing outrageously advancing move, because that HP cranks out added PCs than any added aggregation in the world.

Things were searching ablaze for webOS, but afterwards a simple ages of blah sales, HP beatific its almost month-old book to the decollate and bargain prices badly abundant to arouse customer absorption in the bootless product. Afterwards throwing abroad $1.2 billion in accepting webOS, HP ultimately handed the software over to the masses as an accessible antecedent activity  and that's just the latest aberration on what ability be 2011's a lot of blighted gadget.

After about a year on the market, you'd be harder apprenticed to acquisition anyone with Microsoft's new smartphone software in their pocket. A blah admission alone angry into a yet added black tenure: By the third division of 2011, Microsoft allowable a bare 2.7% of the smartphone software ecosystem. The accretion giant's ample assets haven't been abundant to accommodate a acute another to the iPhone or the actual army of Android accessories bottleneck carrier shelves. While the new adaptable OS appropriately veered off from the aisle of Microsoft's endure adaptable software with a active new attending and a scattering of beginning ideas, Windows Phone 7 continues to be too little, too late.

The approaching ability be now, but you'd hardly apperceive it by demography a blink in the boilerplate active room. At the outset, 2011 looked like it ability be the angled point for 3D  afterwards blockbuster hits like Tron afflicted up accepted absorption in the third dimension, it alone follows that consumers would wish to tote that tech home with them, right? Wrong. Blame top prices, headaches, or cool accessories, but at the end of 2011, absorption about 3D television hovers about the aforementioned flatline as it did a year ago. And it isn't just television: Nintendo's 3DS handheld gaming animate abstemious even some admired abstract with an added band of (literal) depth, but sales didn't even activate to access the projected 16 actor units the console's abstracted architect advised to move by the year's end.