TOP 12 TECH FAILURES OF 2012

From Apple Maps to Epic Hacks: The Year’s Top Tech Fails
By Christina Bonnington, Wired, 18 December 2012.

2012 saw the launch of a hundred dazzling new products and services...and more than a few stinky duds.

Apple Maps sent us driving straight into the desert instead of our intended town. Security fail after security fail left us scrambling to change our passwords and keep our digital identities secure. And stunning, colourful industrial design couldn’t save Nokia from another dismal year of finances.

Gadget Lab collected this year’s most splendidly horrendous products and events and rounded them up for you to groan over. Anything we miss? Sound off in the comments.

1. The Winner: iOS 6 Maps

Let us all agree that Apple’s Maps app is the biggest tech fail of 2012. Since its debut with iOS 6 in September, the mapping service, which took the place of the Google-built version included in previous iOS iterations, has had a no end of complaints for incorrectly labelling towns and landmarks, leading people wildly astray and generally being a hot mess.

Bugs and problems aren’t unusual with software and apps, but Maps is such a disaster that police in Australia called it “potentially life-threatening” after Australian drivers using it to find the town of Mildura were instead left stranded in the desert. Other snafus of note were the bridges that wouldn’t look out of place on an acid trip and Maps directing people across lakes or oceans.

GPS and maps are an inextricable part of the smartphone experience, something we’ve come to rely on. The sudden switch to a sub-par mapping service jolted iOS users, required Apple CEO Tim Cook to issue a formal apology, got an exec and manager fired, and sent us scouring for decent alternatives. With hundreds of millions of iOS devices out there, that’s a problem of epic proportions.

2. The Password

Gadget Lab’s Mat Honan is the unfortunate poster boy for all that is wrong with today’s digital security measures - namely, the password. His epic hack, which could happen to any one of us, made one thing clear: The password has got to go.

The number of hacks and password leaks grows every year - LinkedIn, eHarmony, Yahoo and Paypal were among the high-profile hacks in recent months. The password is a big, fat fail as far as online security goes. Our accounts are typically daisy-chained - multiple accounts are linked to the same e-mail, passwords are re-used over and over, and a hacker can leverage public information from one account to take control of another. With our interactions and transactions increasingly taking place on mobile devices or across the cloud, our current security scenario is a fail that needs to be fixed, stat.

3. Blackberry 10 Delays

RIM was supposed to deliver its latest and greatest smartphone platform, Blackberry 10, this year, but it keeps getting delayed. With each delay, more Blackberry users looking for a new phone turn to iOS, Android and Windows Phone instead...and find they don’t miss Blackberry at all.

Particularly, Blackberry is haemorrhaging from its core users: People in IT and enterprise are abandoning the platform in droves.

Even its last release, Blackberry 7, launched with nary a ripple when it debuted in 2011. Blackberry 10 is set to launch January 30. It can’t come soon enough, and it had better be epically good.

4. Nokia’s Failed Resurgence

Nokia announced in early 2011 that it would be shacking up with Microsoft to produce sweet, sweet Windows Phone babies. It would take some time for Nokia, the hardware-making half of that marriage, to start shipping the phones, but come 2012, we were ready - and excited - for the first wave of Windows Phone handsets from the Finnish mobile-phone giant.

Windows Phone was a breath of fresh air to the mobile space, with a decidedly modern look that was a complete departure from the icon-filled home screens and user interfaces of iOS and Android handsets. And Nokia had the design chops to create fun, unique smartphone designs, namely the brightly coloured, polycarbonate Lumia series.

But our excitement was short-lived. The Lumia 800 launched as part of a $900 bundle that was tough for even the most hard-core Windows diehard to swallow. It fell flat. And so have its other smartphone efforts thus far. The company is bleeding money and smartphone sales are way down.

Here’s hoping the $100 Lumia 920 will start to pick up momentum here in the U.S. and help give Nokia a happier 2013.

5. Google Nexus Q

The Nexus Q was an oddball announcement at this year’s Google I/O conference. The spherical $300-plus gadget was largely a flop, and it isn’t even widely available.

The Q is a music streamer, but it’s uber expensive and extremely limited in functionality: It’s designed to work only with Google Play and YouTube (Rdio, Pandora, and iTunes fans are SOL). We also found it difficult to set up.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of other streaming solutions you can use to pull music from the cloud, and most of them are dirt cheap. Perhaps Google realized that, because it has delayed the Q’s launch to give it some additional features. We think the Nexus Q could make a sweet Nexus Google TV device, but we’ll have to wait and see if Google decides to go in that direction.

6. The Path Address-Book Debacle

In February, a software developer made a startling discovery about the iOS version of the mobile-only social networking app Path - it was uploading your entire address book to its servers without your permission. Users cried foul in a big way. Apple even said the action violated its policy. Shortly thereafter, a handful of other apps (mostly of the social media variety) drew fire for similar privacy violations, each quickly updating their app to amend the issue.

Path CEO Dave Morin apologized and explained what happened - the data was used for the sake of simplicity in order for some of Path’s core functions (connecting with your network) to work. The widely publicized issue did some good though, as mobile giants banded together to commit to better privacy practices on their networks.

7. AT&T Not Allowing FaceTime Over Cellular

The nation’s least favourite cellular provider got itself into even more hot water earlier this year when it announced one of iOS 6’s most anticipated new features - FaceTime video chatting over cellular - wouldn’t be available to subscribers unless they upped their data plan to a pricier shared option. AT&T’s excuse: As the network with the greatest number of iPhone users, new features like this can have a greater, more immediate impact on its network than on its competitors, and without the ability to model the effect beforehand, they decided to take a “more cautious approach.”

Net neutrality activists quickly asked the FCC to weigh in, and AT&T partially backtracked in November, allowing 4G LTE users (iPhone 5 and 2012 iPad owners) to use FaceTime over cellular. It’s better than nothing, but still lame for iPhone 4 and 4S owners.

8. 3-D TV Still Sucks

CES has been pushing 3-D in a big way every year since 2010. Almost every new TV has a 3-D function built in these days, so you’re kind of forced to pick one that provides some sort of 3-D experience. Case in point, roughly 25 percent of LCD TV panel shipments are 3-D now. But does anyone use it? Does anyone like it?

No.

“Our research shows that even though consumers own these 3-D ready TV devices, they haven’t viewed a significant amount of content on them,” NPD DisplaySearch’s vice president of emerging display technologies Jennifer Colegrove wrote in a September report. “Before broader adoption can be expected, there is still a need for more 3-D content and a smoother set-up process for 3-D TV.”

Right, because no one really wants to have to put on a pair of glasses to enjoy their TV. Until the 3-D experience is as painless (read: not nausea-inducing) as your regular old 2-D experience, it's going to stay a major tech fail.

9. Laplets

Windows 8 is all about the tablet-laptop, a hybrid monstrosity dubbed the laplet. Of the laplets we’ve gotten our hands on so far (a fairly decent number), only the Lenovo Yoga didn’t suck.

It’s a rare talent to be able to master multiple, unique use cases in a single device. The notable exception is the iPhone (which Steve Job described as “an iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator” upon its initial release), and other smartphones. Few things have enjoyed such success, proving it can be difficult to combine seemingly disparate gadgets. As Apple CEO Tim Cook noted in April, “You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user.”

It was a subtle jibe at Windows 8 and its hybrid devices, but it’s a valid point. Unfortunately, we’re expecting a whole lot more of the craplet variety of laplet at CES this year. For most hardware, we have this advice: Pick a single job, do it well.

10. Amazon’s Big Fat Outage

Photo: Yuko Honda/Flickr

Amazon’s had quite a few outages this year, but none measure up to the big‘un that took down popular sites and services like Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest.

The outages revealed to businesses the dangers of not building a proper cloud-based infrastructure (one big storm, generators that fail to work, and pow! your site is down and there’s nothing you can do). It also showed that you should probably make sure your backup generators are up to snuff before you actually need them. And of course, those of us that rely on such cloud-based services found that we really don’t know what to do with ourselves when our favourite services get knocked down.

11. Zynga

After filing for a $1 billion IPO in 2011 and purchasing top-tier games like Words With Friends and Draw Something, casual gaming giant Zynga has gone down the tubes.

The company’s stock tumbled and then tumbled some more as Facebook adjusted its policies with the largely Facebook-reliant game maker.

Even in 2011, with 54 million active daily users, Zynga lost $400 million over the course of the year. And in October, Zynga laid off 5 percent of its workers and closed down 13 games. It looks like the whole Farmville craze was just a fad, and Zynga could be going the unfortunate way of so many other Internet upstarts (that is, totally non-existent in a few years’ time).

12. Twitter’s API Changes

Twitter made some big changes to its API this year, and we pretty much hate them. Most of you do too.

In the past, Twitter’s app design have left us wanting more, and third party developers stepped in to serve that need, offering varied user interfaces and useful tools that Twitter hadn’t built itself. But Twitter wants those users back on Twitter, and wants third parties to “build into Twitter” rather than around the platform. Thus, the changes nix the existence of third party Twitter clients in their current form and generally sound pretty lame, although the rules, outlined in a blog post, are still somewhat vague. Apps like Twitterific, Echofon, Tweetdeck, and Tweetbot are just a few of the services affected by the changes.

At least it opens up the possibility for some cool Twitter-free Twitter alternatives.

[Source: Wired. Edited.]

Related Posts:

1. The Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2012

2. 10 Gadgets That Deserved to Die