Gear

The Top 10 Heartbreaking Gadgets of 2007

In a year full of new-fangled goodness, a hit list of duds stands out. Wired News picks the promising technology that became the year’s biggest letdowns.
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It doesn't seem quite right to call Amazon's electronic-book tablet a letdown, as our expectations were tempered from the start. But the retailer not only managed to validate most of our original concerns but add a few new ones. You probably know the rap sheet by now: No native PDF support. Costs as much as a low-end laptop. "Klugey" keyboard. Clumsy, extortionate e-mail conversion process for adding your own files. And the web browser? Crippled. But what really kills us? You have to pay to read a blog on this thing.Image: Amazon
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Photo: AP/Paul Sakuma
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Photo: Canon
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Image: Microsoft
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In the format war that consumers have wisely tried to ignore, HD DVD got one thing right: the name. Familiar and easy to spell, it sounds like a simple upgrade for something we already own. Blu-ray, on the other hand, is pretty much better in every other way. It has a larger capacity and a better range of movies, and it's slowly edging out HD DVD in the sales charts. Add to that the PlayStation3, which includes a Blu-ray drive, and things start to look bleak for HD DVD. The upside? It's all a moot point anyway. The real future of entertainment lies not in any form of physical media, but in high-speed downloads and dizzyingly fast data transfers.

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Photo: Courtesy of Steorn
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Photo: Daniel Cortes / Flickr