Worst of the Week: The iZune and other losers

Hello!
And welcome to our Thursday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCR Wireless News to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!
And without further ado:
So Palm killed its Foleo device shortly before it was scheduled to ship, and the company will take a $10 million charge over the misstep. Palm’s DOA Foleo device featured a full keyboard and a flip-open screen, which is a form factor generally referred to as “laptop.”
The Foleo is sure to become an instant collector’s item, right alongside Sierra Wireless’ Voq and Sendo’s X. Ah, smartphone flameouts!
(For all you entrepreneurs out there, the Voq is currently on eBay for $70. Act fast!)
Anyway, all this leads me to my point, which is to provide a list of some of the other DOA cellphones that various manufacturers developed over the past several years but decided not to release.
How did I get this list, you ask? It’s a funny story that involves Chuck Norris, but I don’t have time to go into it here. Suffice to say: I’m a member of the fourth estate, which means I routinely get copies of important documents, but still can’t afford to get a proper haircut.
Anyway, here we go:
–The PaperCut
This was a cellphone Samsung designed during the height of the wireless industry’s “Slim Wars.” The “Slim Wars” occurred shortly after the release of the Moto Razr, when the rest of the market’s handset makers realized people liked thin phones. Samsung essentially blitzed the market with a number of increasingly thin phones in order to cash in on the trend.
The Samsung PaperCut represented the pinnacle of the company’s thin-phone engineering effort, but was not released because it kept giving users . papercuts.
ZING!
Anyway, the “Slim Wars” are not to be confused with the “Clone Wars.”
–The Ford Expedition by Nokia
The Ford Expedition by Nokia was a cellphone Nokia was working on as the centerpiece of its Nseries “multimedia computer” line. The Expedition combined all of the various cellphone advances Nokia likes to cram into its phones-a high-end digital camera, a 10 GB music player, a high-definition, flat-screen TV, a satellite music receiver, a graphing calculator and an electric hair trimmer, among other things.
The phone weighed five pounds and had little built-in wheels that you could use to drive it around.
See, Nokia at the time figured Americans especially would go for a big, all-in-one phone, judging from our love of gigantic SUVs like the Ford Expedition. The only problem with the Ford Expedition by Nokia cellphone was that it routinely strangled users (Nokia for some reason built tiny mechanical arms into the phone).
The Ford Expedition by Nokia is now available on eBay for $70.
–The Microsoft iZune
The iZune was going to be Microsoft’s next big play in the handset industry, following the company’s relative successes with its Windows Mobile operating system. The iZune, which was scheduled to be released next month, featured a touchscreen and an innovative, easy-to-use interface.
For the iZune, Microsoft essentially did away with its clunky, convoluted Windows-based UI and replaced it with an elegant, straightforward menu system that made users happy and satisfied instead of angry and sad.
However, Microsoft scrapped the iZune after Apple released the iPhone, figuring that the market could only take one easy-to-use product at a time. The Redman, Wash.-based software giant then put all its energies into designing thousands of tiny icons that do nothing.
So there you have it! As you can see, the Palm Foleo isn’t the only mobile gadget to get nixed due to spectacular stupidity, and it certainly won’t be the last.
OK! Enough of that. Thanks for checking out this Worst of the Week column. And now, some extras:
–A few weeks ago I wrote a Worst of the Week column about . something. I can’t quite remember what the point of it was (they sort of blend together, don’t they?) but I did include an item about how Bob Marley’s music is annoying. Well let me tell you, there are some big Bob Marley fans out there who didn’t appreciate my opinion one bit. So in order to forestall any such incidents in the future, here’s a list of the other musicians I don’t like: everything except for Guns N’ Roses.
–AT&T announced a new marketing plan to emphasize mobility. As part of the campaign, AT&T said it will launch a new Web site that will allow people to “create a ‘digital personality’ by using modules of color to express how they use their digital world.” If anyone out there can translate this into English, you get a prize. Because my color modules are glowing red with fury.
–And the best headline of the week award goes to Forbes, which published an article detailing Apple’s $100 credit to current iPhone owners with the headline, “Steve Jobs: iSorry.” ZING!
I welcome your comments. Please send me an e-mail at mdano@crain.com.