It's been a banner year for smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches of the turkey variety; here are the 15 biggest flappers
It may be cliché to highlight turkeys at Thanksgiving, but it's a
good time of year to look back at what to give thanks for — and what to
learn from as a new year approaches.
With that in mind, it's been
an extraordinary year for failed mobile products, smartphones, tablets,
and more. I can't recall a larger gaggle of mobile turkeys. Let me carve
them up for you!
Amazon Fire Phone
The biggest flameout was Amazon.com's Fire
Phone, the poster child of how not to develop a product. The Fire Phone
was all about serving Amazon's greed,
not at all about its customers. When a company forgets that customers
keep it in business, you get products like the Fire Phone — and
executives who can't believe customers aren't as sheeplike as they would
prefer.
The Fire Phone isn't so much a smartphone but a portable product
scanner and ordering device tied to a single vendor that also happens to
make phone calls. Who on earth would want that? I'm all for mobile
shopping, but I want to do it at more than one store. Any iPhone,
Android, or Windows Phone can do that, thanks to store apps and QR code
readers.
Real
technology chops were required to create the Fire Phone's ability to
take a picture of a product and find it on the Amazon store, but the
advancements were ultimately wasted. It's like sequencing the human DNA
to be able to create only blond children. Surely, there are more useful
benefits than photographing objects in the world to order them from
Amazon.
The Fire Phone also has all the shortcomings of
Amazon's other Fire devices, its Kindle Fire tablet series, which are
designed to conquer only Amazon content and provide a stripped-down,
poor Android fork to ensure you can't do anything else on them. Worse,
the Fire Phone requires you to buy a monthly data plan to essentially
only shop with it. Even cutting its price to 99 cents with contract
couldn't fool enough people to move the needle.
Samsung Galaxy S5
The Galaxy line has been Samsung's star attraction and the powerhouse behind its Android dominance in the West. But cracks began to appear in 2013's Galaxy S 4 and its uneven software. This year's Galaxy S5 had software that was as unbaked as the S 4's and a cheaper-feeling casing.
Soon after its launch came rumors that sales were dismal, and multiple market analysts said Apple's "failed" iPhone 5c
was outselling it, as was the then-six-month-old iPhone 5s and, for a
time, even Samsung's own S 4. (True numbers are impossible to come by,
as Samsung does not report them, and its statements of what sells well
don't always match what actually happens in the market.)
This fall, Samsung revealed its smartphone profits had dropped precipitously, before the iPhone 6 debuted to huge sales. Samsung managed to sink its flagship by neglecting it and assuming buyers wouldn't notice. They did, and they bought devices from Apple, HTC, and LG instead.
iPad Mini 3 and iPad Air 2
I'll say it bluntly: This year's new iPads are
the equivalents of last year's iPhone 5s: the last iteration of an old
design. Adding the Touch ID sensor is welcome but an obvious change given that it debuted a year ago in the iPhone 5s. In a year when Apple reinvented the iPhone, remade mobile payments with Apple Pay, and invented the Apple Watch, maybe it is too much to expect it to reinvent the iPad.
But it's time to take the iPad to a higher level,
and Apple's hype-heavy iPad debut event — it spent more time on them
than it had on the iPhone 6's debut — couldn't hide that fact. Apple
shouldn't have pretended the new iPads were a big deal.
Android and Tizen smartwatches
The failure to move the iPad to the next level
while pretending to is a minor transgression, though, compared to the
series of disasters that has been the smartwatch market this year,
powered by Android and Tizen OSes.
Responding to rumors in the
last couple years that Apple might have a smartwatch in the works,
Samsung has delivered three failed incarnations of its Gear, an ugly,
bulky watch that does very little useful. (Samsung should stop worrying
about what Apple might do and figure out instead what it can be good at
itself.)
LG and Motorola Mobility came up with their own. LG's G
Watch R was clunky but more watchlike, and Motorola's Moto 360 was cool
to look at but not very functional — its circular face is quite
attractive, but the square display rendered by the underlying Android
Wear OS exceeds the screen's boundaries, so only the middle line of
alerts and so on are complete. Clearly, no one tested this before
shipping it.
The reviews of the Moto 360 have been the kindest — but hardly kind. I'm reminded of those horrible early Android tablets such as the original Galaxy Tab 7.
Let's hope it doesn't take the Android watch community as long to come
up with decent devices once the Apple Watch ships this coming spring as
it did for the Android tablet community after the iPad's debut.
If you want a smartwatch today, get the one that is actually good: the Pebble.
It may come from an upstart company and use an OS you never heard of,
but unlike the Android and Tizen competitors, it works well.
There's a poult (look it up)
in this category too: The new Microsoft Band fitness monitor that
smartly runs with Android, iOS, and Windows Phone devices but is
uncomfortable to wear — which it needs you to do all day, every day.
Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2
Chasing another rumor about Apple's potential moves, Samsung unveiled its 12-inch Galaxy Note Pro 12.2
this winter, showing clearly that bigger is not always better. The Note
Pro 12.2 is awkward to hold and awkward to use, with insufficient
accommodation in its interface for its outsize scale. Again, you have to
wonder if anyone used this thing before manufacturing it. No wonder
Samsung is in trouble.
Samsung Knox
The trouble continues at Samsung. In spring
2012, Samsung debuted its Knox security technology that creates a
separate workspace for personal and business usage, in the same vein as
BlackBerry's Balance technology. It even won Defense Dept. approval.
But reports soon surfaced that the Knox technology didn't work as promised on the few Galaxy smartphones that supported it, and the product release date kept slipping.
Although several mobile management vendors promised support for Knox,
that backing didn't go much beyond press releases. Worse, potential
customers balked at paying another $3 per user per month for Knox on top
of the MDM fees for Galaxy users.
By the time Knox 2 — the real Knox — became available in spring 2014, Google decided to buy a competitor called Divide and incorporate it in Android 5.0 Lollipop.
Samsung and Google made noises about some aspects of Knox being
incorporated into Lollipop, but to this day they won't say what, if any,
of Knox is in Lollipop.
Tellingly, when Google bought Divide, Samsung began discussions with BlackBerry to have BlackBerry's BES12 support Knox,
which Samsung continues to make available for some of its Android
devices. When I asked them, both Samsung and BlackBerry execs were vague
about what specific capabilities the Knox tie-in with BES12 would
bring, promising merely a strong partnership on future efforts. I can
only wonder how much Samsung paid BlackBerry for this fig-leaf deal.
Tizen, Firefox OS, and Ubuntu Touch
For us tech pundits, a world that has
essentially consolidated to Android and iOS is a bit boring, and we all
root for BlackBerry and Windows Phone to matter somewhere, somehow. We
sometimes get excited by puppy mobile OSes like Tizen, Firefox OS, and
Ubuntu Touch, which despite their open source pedigree are creatures of
Samsung and Intel, Mozilla, and Canonical, respectively.
None
is new, but 2014 was supposed to be the year each got real, coming to
market in multiple products. It didn't happen, and it likely won't ever
at this point. (Remember the Tizen-powered Samsung Z that was supposed to ship first in Russia? It didn't.)
Although they have intriguing aspects, the fact is they're all hugely
inferior to Android and iOS, even to BlackBerry and Windows Phone. Why
bother?
Tizen has no real mission other than to be a paper tiger Samsung can wave at Google when they fight over Android's direction. Firefox OS and Ubuntu Touch
come from open source dreamers who believe that all a smartphone needs
to be is a glorified Web browser. Google's been trying that for five
years with Chrome OS, to marginal uptake at best (it might finally have
cracked the 1 percent new-sales threshold this year).
Android's AOSP version and Microsoft's free phone licenses have taken away most of the cost factor advantage of a free open source mobile OS.
You can still build cheaper Firefox OS and Ubuntu Touch phones than
AOSP or Windows Phone devices, but not much cheaper — and you get phones
that can do very little. People in poor countries may not have much
money, but if they spend it on a smartphone, it has to handle
sufficiently useful tasks to justify any price.
Google Docs for iOS and Android
For years, Apple's iWork suite was the
undisputed king of the mobile office suites, though the now-defunct
Quickoffice had long been a strong second choice, and for many a
superior one for Word and Excel file usage. This winter, Microsoft
debuted Office for iPad and a couple weeks ago made it available for the
iPhone. The first Office for iPad was good, not great. But with several
revisions since that debut, Office for iOS is now very good, a strong rival to iWork.
The same can't be said for the sad suite that is Google Docs, a marginally capable office-productivity trio
that will quickly convince you to save your work for when you get back
to your desk and have a real word processor — or switch to Office or
iWork on an iOS device. The Android version of Google Docs is slightly
more capable than the iOS version, but not enough to prevent you from
jumping to Office for Android when that finally ships, probably in early
2015.
Google keeps pushing its Docs suite on mobile devices and
Apps suite (aka Google for Work) for the desktop Web as alternatives to
Microsoft Office, but it keeps failing miserably on the mobile side of
the equation — where all the computing growth is. It makes no sense.
Apple CarPlay
Enough of the promises, already! Apple's been
talking about CarPlay for more than two years, and it's still MIA. Those
2014 models from 29 marques that were supposed to have it on "select
models"? Crickets. Apart from a $300,000 Ferrari vehicle, Pioneer is the
only company that seems to have CarPlay gear, in the form of aftermarket stereos.
Sure,
part of that is the slow pace of the automakers, most of whom still
can't believe that people hate their horrible attempts at infotainment
systems. (Ford, I'm talking to you!) Part of that is waiting for one of
the kings of waitware, Google, to debut its CarPlay clone called Android
Auto, so they're not beholden to only Apple.
But CarPlay's long hello is starting to feel like "Waiting for Godot" — without the intention to be so.
Turkeys that lived to see another year
You don't see
BlackBerry or Windows Phone on my list of 2014's mobile turkeys —
because they were 2013 turkeys that lived another year. Both are still
struggling to hold onto their dismal market shares, but both are in the
middle of plausible turnaround efforts that won't bear fruit for a good
year.
BlackBerry has its back-to-the-past BlackBerry Classic (basically, a BlackBerry Q10
in a BlackBerry Bold case) debuting in a couple weeks, but its real
hopes are on its expanded set of management capabilities and apps powered by its new BES12 management server.
The perpetually pretty but dumb Windows Phone got a serious update this year — Windows Phone 8.1
— plus the Siri clone called Cortana, but the real make-or-break point
for Windows Phone is at least a year away, after the debut of the
unified Windows 10. If that fifth version of the Windows Phone fails to turn on customers, Windows Phone will head to the carving table.
But that's a meal to contemplate for next year, not now.
Source: http://www.infoworld.com
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