Top 10 Tech Train Wrecks of 2007

From MVNO meltdowns to gaming-console flameouts, the wide world of tech had its fair share of fiascos this year. Check out 2007's most spectacular consumer-tech train wrecks.

Without further ado, I present this year's hall of shame (in no particular order):

Xbox 360 hardware woes
Microsoft really hit it out of the park when it came to the Xbox 360's software—consider the slick Dashboard, the persistent Achievements and Gamertags, and the top-notch Xbox Video Marketplace. But the actual 360 hardware is a disaster: chronically glitchy, prone to overheating, and all too susceptible to the "Red Ring of Death," which signals a critical hardware failure. Indeed, I'm already on my second Xbox 360 in barely a year, and just about every 360 owner I know has had to send their console back to Redmond for repair. In June, Microsoft finally did the right thing and owned up to the shoddy state of its hardware, extending the Xbox 360's warranty to a full three years and taking a $1 billion charge in the process.

BlackBerry service goes dark
Corporate road warriors love, love, love their BlackBerrys—so much so that they freaked when the service ground to a halt for about 12 hours back in April. Luckily, the outage—later blamed on a "software upgrade"—occurred mainly during the wee hours in North America (not so lucky for the rest of the planet, of course), but frantic users had to deal with a sputtering backlog of e-mail the next day. RIM CEO Jim Basillie pledged that the same problem wouldn't happen twice—although BlackBerry users were hit with another (smaller) outage in September. Which leads us to...

Skype conks out
For many Net users and businesses across the globe, Skype isn't just a favorite VoIP provider; it's also become their instant messenger of choice. So imagine the chaos that ensued on August 16, when a "software issue" (yep, another one) struck down Skype for millions of chatters. The outage ended up lasting for a full two days, during which time desperate Skypers were left to scrounge for VoIP alternatives. Once the service was up and running again, Skype reps apologized, blaming a "perfect storm" of conditions for the meltdown: namely, a Windows software update that caused a mass reboot of PCs around the world.

Fading picture for Apple TV
The launch of Apple's long-awaited TV set-top box came amid enormous hype; we were told that Apple TV would be nothing less than the iPod of the living room. But when it finally hit store shelves, Apple TV landed with a thud. Users complained about poor picture quality, a puny selection of movies (only a few hundred movies from a handful of studios are available), and worst of all, no way to browse the iTunes Store from the Apple TV itself. Forbes reports that only 250,000 units were sold in six month, and Apple seems to have lost interest in the device; short of introducing a 160GB model and YouTube support in May, Cupertino has fallen more or less silent about its half-baked foray into home theater. Not so much a train wreck as a slow fade into obscurity. And speaking of slow, sad fades...

Sony shutters Connect
You'd think Sony—the maker of the original PMP, the Walkman—would have been all over digital music, yet it ceded the music downloading market to Apple years ago. Still, in 2005, Sony prepped its answer to iTunes: Sony Connect, a joint venture with a Silicon Valley start-up called Kinoma. But the project was a debacle from the get-go, with corporate in-fighting and botched software releases essentially dooming Connect before it got off the ground (check out this CNET News.com story for the inside scoop), not to mention Sony's stubborn allegiance to its proprietary (and soon-to-be-defunct) ATRAC file format. In late August, Sony finally put Connect out of its misery, announcing that the service (save for its eBook offerings) would shut down sometime after March 2008.

Palm gives Foleo the heave-ho
The makers of the first smartphone promised us a "new category" in mobile devices back in May, and what we got was...well, something, anyway. Palm execs called the Foleo a smartphone "companion": a little, 2.5-pound laptop that connects to your Treo via Bluetooth, giving you a bigger screen and a full keypad for checking email, Web browsing, editing documents, and so on. Despite the ensuing cackles, I think Palm was on to something—after all, in 10 years, our phones may well be more powerful than today's desktops, and all you'll need is a thin-client laptop to go with your powerhouse of a handset. But for now, the Foleo looks—or rather, looked—like little more than an underpowered, $500 subnotebook, which you'd have to lug around with your actual notebook. The Foleo never saw the light of day; Palm wisely killed it off in September.

Vonage: stuck in the mud
Talk about a slow-motion train wreck. Vonage, the once high-flying VoIP provider with all those clever TV commercials, is facing a mountain of debt, while customers—most of them frustrated by poor customer service—have been steadily defecting. At the center of it all: a pair of court rulings from late 2006 that held Vonage responsible infringing patents owned by Sprint Nextel and Verizon Communications. Vonage has settled all of the infringement charges, including a new set of charges brought by AT&T, but it's still in debt to the tune of $250 million and climbing, according to BusinessWeek, along with more than $200 million in payments now due to Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T. That's pretty bad news when you've only got about $355 million left in your bank account. Whether Vonage survives, gets bought out, or declares bankruptcy is still an open question. Meanwhile, long-suffering Vonage customers are left hanging in the balance (although service is reportedly improving).

Amp'd Mobile goes dark
It wasn't that long ago that MVNOs (short for Mobile Virtual Network Operators) were absolutely red-hot—and Amp'd Mobile, a hip, youth-oriented MVNO featuring edgy TV commercials and 3G handsets—was one of the brightest stars. But Amp'd tumbled to earth in June, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection; by July, it notified subscribers that it was shutting down for good. What happened? Turns out that while Amp'd was signing up new subscribers left and right, only about half of them were paying their bills. D'oh!

Apple riles iPhone owners with price cut, hack-busting updates
Steve Jobs never saw it coming. In September, along with announcements of a new family of iPods, Jobs dropped a bombshell: Apple was cutting the price of the 8GB iPhone to $399 (from $599). How generous, right? But early adopters were outraged: just weeks before, they'd paid more than $600 for their precious iPhones, and now here's Sir Steve, essentially telling them they'd wasted a couple of C-notes. Jobs ultimately bowed to the howls of protest, offering a $100 store credit for everyone who had bought an iPhone before the price cut. Then, another stumble: Apple released an iPhone update in October that re-locked (and in some cases, bricked) hacked iPhones, sparking another wave of anger. Jobs has since announced that the iPhone will support third-party apps (which must now be hacked onto the iPhone) starting next year, but the damage is done. All those warm fuzzies for Apple upon the original release of the iPhone? Buh-bye.

HD format war drags on, begins to feel pointless
The back-and-forth battle between the Blu-ray and HD DVD camps continues to rage, with no end in sight. Blu-ray backers were telling us back in January that they had it all wrapped up, especially with the release of Blu-ray-packing PlayStation 3 consoles. But then something funny happened: the PS3 didn't sell nearly as well as expected (although sales are on the uptick thanks to recent price cuts). Meanwhile, prices for HD DVD decks fell steadily, while stand-alone Blu-ray price tags stayed stubbornly in the $400 to $500 range. Then, in August, HD DVD delivered a brutal sucker punch when Paramount and DreamWorks pulled their support for Blu-ray, choosing instead to go with HD DVD exclusively (word is the two studios were paid handsomely for crossing the street). As it stands now, the HD format war is at (in the words of Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer himself) a "stalemate." What's the punchline to this sad tale? By the time this slugfest is over, we'll probably be downloading all our HD movies anyway.