QOTW: Which doomed tech products were actually good?

[OilSheikh]

Microsoft Intellimouse the earliest LED mouse IMO
Namco Guncon
Windows XP Media Centre remote
Blackberry
Nokia phones
LG G Flex
PS2

[Wrinkly]

Zip drives, Vectrex & laser discs.

[peterb]

Sony Betamax

Sony Elcassette (I think that’s what it was called)

[nar53]

Well my old man bought a Betamax which sat in his loft for about 20yrs so its Betamax for me.

[scaryjim]

Windows Phone.

Windows Phone. ...

Seconded

I believe I'm up to Fourthed now. And I still use a Windows Phone device for work, to keep a couple of work-related apps off my personal mobile.

That said:

… Blackberry ...

or, to be more specific, Blackberry OS 10. I have a current gen Blackberry - the keyONE - and it's a nice device, but BB OS 10 was so nice to use, and it guts me that it's been completely abandoned...#

EDIT: heh, just read the actual article, and had a little giggle at:

just thinking about the dreadful Nokia N-Gage sends a shiver down the spine

Some few years back I was looking for a cheap SIM-free phone with Bluetooth, and the cheapest option at the time was the (2nd Gen) N-Gage QD, which actually looked like quite a nice device. If I could find one cheap with a few games thrown in I might consider it...

[Fogoldgaming]

Windows phone. Apricot xen PC's. Sony Vaio. Daughter got one when she was 18 and she's 26.Still going No laptop had lasted that long with me up till now. No broken hinges or knackered charging ports.

[eviling]

Logitech MX518 and G400
That shape of mouse just worked perfectly for my hand. Today there are many clones, but none quite like the real ones.

And then in general it seemed that older tech, like mouse/keyboard/screens just had a much lower latency between physical press to actual output on the screen.

And maybe the cartridges for NES and Commodore? i kinda liked that system.

[g8ina]

again Betamax, the poor 2nd choice won the market

Same (IMHO) with HD-DVD, I still think BluRay is the poor choice over HD-DVD.


and whatever happened to DVD-Audio, one of THE great audio formats... SACD - thats what

[spacein_vader]

Another vote for Windows Phone.

And another vote for MiniDisc.

I'll also throw in Microsoft's sidewinder series of peripherals.

[EvilCycle]

Multi GPU technology, it might not be completely dead but it shouldn't be so out of reach and un-optimised in 2018. I remember all of the talk of DX12 and how we will be able to use multi GPU even if they are not the same model. What happened to that? Imagine a future of being able to still use your previous graphics card to offload tasks without limiting the newer GPU in any way.

I imagine it is mostly because the GPU companies don't want people buying 2 x mid range cards instead of 1 x high end card, in fact Nvidia proved that by removing SLI from the GTX1060. I hate the way greed stifles what the consumer can have and how can they use it.

[OilSheikh]

ATI X series onboard graphics motherboards, nforce with onboard nvidia graphics motherboards were also decent before Intel changed the scene

[NightshadowUK]

Logitech MX518 and G400
That shape of mouse just worked perfectly for my hand. Today there are many clones, but none quite like the real ones.

Still use my MX518 at work every day, has to be over 10 years old! Not sure it can class as doomed though, I think they sold pretty well.

I'm going to go for anything related to 3D. It was pretty cool, especially in some 3rd person games but yeah... doomed from the start.

[DerbyDave]

windows phone.

[Phrontis]

The Microwriter Agenda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwriter Fantastic piece of kit with the chord keyboard. Once you have learnt the way it works you could key in characters at a fantastic rate. I learnt the way to use the chord keyboard in one night shift.
Windows phone. Microsoft please bring it back. My HP Elite X3 is a superb piece of kit but now being limited by a lack of apps. LinkedIn doesn't even work anymore.

[Phrontis]

I always wanted a Zune but they never made it to the UK.

All 3 of my sons had Zunes, bought in the UK.

[DanceswithUnix]

Gravis Ultrasound. Superb audio technology, killed my Microsoft basically adopting the pathetic Soundblaster hardware as the basis for their Windows API.

Microsoft, holding back technology since 1975 (tm)

ATI X series onboard graphics motherboards, nforce with onboard nvidia graphics motherboards were also decent before Intel changed the scene

That was a solution to a specific technical problem though, northbridge chips had lots of connections which forced the chip to be big enough to have that many connections around the outside, so they needed something to put in the middle. Integrated ddr controllers on CPUs is what really killed that, so chipset graphics was never really going to get any better.

Now, sideport ram, perhaps there is still a case for a dedicated graphics ram stick