2008 featured a major shift in the computing world with the introduction of low cost ultraportable netbooks. Was this for the best? What about other technology that was introduced this year that failed to really catch on? Let's take a look at some of the products and technologies that in 2008 that I feel either failed to change the market or hurt the market as a whole.
5. Nettops
©ASUSTeK
Nettops were an offshoot of the netbook market. Essentially they are small boxes that take the internals of a netbook with their limited processor, memory and storage placed into a small box to be used with a computer monitor just like a desktop computer. While they may have an extremely small price tag, their lack of features and performance make them a poor choice to be used as a desktop computer. About the only place they make sense is used with a TV as a terminal within a home network, but even there they failed at tasks such as handling high definition video streams. Consumers were just better off buying low cost budget desktops that had so much more to offer.
4. VIA Nano
Just about every netbook on the market uses an Intel processor. This wasn't going to be the case based on what VIA had to say. Their new Nano processor was supposed to offer far more performance than the Intel Atom. They went on to do a wide variety of demonstrations of the two processors side by side to show just how great their netbook processor was. This brought lots of hope that companies like HP would upgrade their 2133 Mini-Note that used the very anemic C7-M. To date, VIA has failed to deliver a product that uses this processor making it a huge disappointment for those hoping to have some competition in the netbook world against the behemoth Intel.3. AMD Phenom
©Advanced Micro Devices
AMD was hugely successful with their Athlon processors such that they gained their largest market shares ever. That changed when Intel released their Core 2 architecture. AMD's response was the Phenom processor that they put a lot of hope into. With the initial Phenom processors having a pretty major bug in them and their performance falling short of what Intel could do, AMD was forced to move back to their previous role by trying to undercut Intel's pricing. This made the Phenom's extremely affordable for consumers but anyone looking for serious performance that got one was surely disappointed. Things may be looking up for AMD though next year with their scheduled Phenom II processor.
2. Intel Atom
Low power consumption and inexpensive were the goals of the Intel Atom. It certainly did meet these two goals and became a huge success in the netbooks that flooded the market after its release. Its success was so big that Intel even delayed the dual core version. So, why does this make the list of tech failures? Frankly, Intel and other companies already had existing mobile chips that could be produced very inexpensively that performed just as well or better than the Intel Atom. The performance of this process has set back mobile computing many years. In fact, anyone looking for a real PC is generally better off buying a low cost laptop with a two year old processor to get more performance.1. Solid State Drives
©Sandisk Corporation
There was a lot of promise about how much better storage would be with solid state drives in 2008. They were going to be faster, lower power and more reliable than traditional hard drives. It was expected that they would be more expensive as is the case with most technology. What was surprising is the early drives that ended up not really being any faster than traditional disk based drives and using roughly the same amount of energy. The technology did improve over the year, but the dramatic costs and limited storage just didn't make them practical except in certain limited situations.
