Gadgetory

ah yes 2011 what a great ear for tech except for the stuff that sucked I'm Brian Cooley with the top 5 disappointing technologies of 2011 tech that only a fanboy could love let's get started number 5 electric cars from the Chevy Volts mist sales targets and some shrill safety headlines to the Nissan Leafs slowing sales to Morgan Stanley's having of its projections for all Evie is going up to like 2025 this was the year that Evie is hit and bounced off much of the blame belongs to a flood of cheap fuel efficient 4 cylinder gas and diesel engine cars that people actually understand Eevee's may still have their day in the Sun to be sure it just won't be on a calendar that has to 0 1 1 written on number 4 iCloud now give Apple credit for moving the concept of cloud into the mainstream but iCloud is kind of an odd bird in that cloud almost a cynically tweaked situation to sell devices and too often I hear the same two comments from iOS 5 users either I disinterested I haven't set it up yet or a mystified get it I suspect it'll be a slow burn like iTunes was initially but for 2011 it goes on this list number 3 Chromebooks this idea looks so visionary when it first came out a radical refresh of the portable computer that relied on a browser running over Linux with the web and apps replacing stale bloaty software and those always full hard drives but so far the early models do too little and do it really poorly and in the process they make this kind of tacit argument that you need another device in between your tablet and your notebook that's a subdivision of tech none of us were looking to move into back to the drawing board number 2 3d TV Emmett Lee given 3d TV long enough the glasses the proprietary than not much to watch the who the hell cares sure 3d TV sales grew a lot 20:11 but that's because more TVs came with it built-in whether you wanted it or not at the very least the 3d TV industry has to move to cheap passive Universal glasses in 2012 in the meantime you can worry less about this tech in the year ahead as I suspect a lot of TV companies might do as well the number one tech dud of 2011 was the Motorola Xoom well and the HP TouchPad and the blackberry playbook and basically all the big non iPad tablets that combined will be lucky to match a tenth of iPad sales Motorola Xoom launched at an insulting 899 70 bucks above the top iPad the PlayBook the first tablet without integrated email from blackberry they're all about email and HP's touch pad Fiasco was enough to help derail the entire company as we wrapped 2011 the conventional wisdom is that the high end of the tablet market is apples to lose and Android has to be happy with the small cheap end of the market considering that those very big iPad killers were 2011 s number one most promising new tech there's enough crow for leftovers all week for more top fives like this head over to top-5 cnet.com i'm brian coulis thanks for watching