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With this fated year finally drawing to a close, it'south time to review our favorite products that didn't manage to launch this twelvemonth. Vaporware was a many-splendored thing this year, with entries from the usual suspects (gaming hardware, video games) and the highly unusual (when was the last fourth dimension you heard about a multi-billion dollar corporation pulling a shrug emoji and hoping no one noticed?) From the ignominious to the merely pathetic, nosotros've rounded up this year's "best" entries.

The Coleco Retro Chameleon

COLECO-ChameleonThe Coleco Chameleon was supposed to exist a new retro gaming panel, and the antitoxin to compulsory DLC. Information technology was a cartridge-based console proposed by RetroVGS, that would ship newly made games that didn't need DLC to be consummate, and wouldn't crave firmware updates to exist stable. Under the hood, nosotros were told, information technology used an FPGA to hardware emulate whatever arrangement your game was from, and then information technology'd play merely like it did on the original hardware. Project leads name-dropped SNES, Intellivision, Atari. When the Chameleon was released, we'd be able to buy system-specific controllers and even adapters for previously owned game cartridges so they'd play on the Chameleon, then the retro gaming feel would exist even more than immersive. Subsequently a failed IndieGoGo entrada, Coleco even lent its name to the Chameleon project, hoping for a retro-gaming renaissance.

In that location were cherry flags aplenty, even at the start. Certain, in that location totally won't be whatever legal problems getting one bit of hardware licensed and spec'd out to play games from everyone else's systems. Nor will there be whatsoever difficulties breaking into the panel market place and creating a totally new gaming ecosystem that requires siphoning away the existing userbase of Sega and Nintendo.

When it came time to coughing upwards some hardware, though, the existent problems began. First there was a "prototype" circuit board that turned out to be cardboard. Then the FPGA turned into a handwavey AMD SOC, ostensibly to streamline the blueprint and cutting costs. Then their showing at the Toy Off-white in New York raised major suspicions well-nigh the projection's legitimacy, when they evidently fielded a badly obfuscated SNES, gaffer's-taped into an Atari Jaguar trounce with notwithstanding-visible hardwired SNES controllers, and claimed it was a functioning build of the Chameleon. Pressed for proof, RetroVGS posted a photo on their Facebook page, which the Cyberspace quickly determined was a PCI video capture card inside a plastic clamshell. RetroVGS apace retracted the photo, but it was too tardily. Coleco got wind of it and pulled their name from the project, and with that, the writing was on the wall.

Theranos

Everyone hates needles, and so let's minimize the agony of claret tests past just taking a single drop of blood. That was the seductive sales pitch for Theranos Labs' blood testing tech, chosen Edison. But for the aforementioned reasons that when you increase gain on a CB radio, you become more signal but also more dissonance, the Edison micro-arrays were doomed to fail from the get-go. They took blood from capillaries, which is different than venous blood and more than variable drop-to-drop, and and so they had to dilute the tiny blood samples so much that the analytes were lost in the solution. Both of these problems compromised examination results.

Papers and employee reports raised suspicions of misconduct, but the whole house of cards fell when federal investigators turned the spotlight on the in-house affairs of Theranos. When their blood tests failed — which a 3rd of them did — they quit using the Edison device entirely and resorted to buying other companies' tests and using those. The FDA promptly banned Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes from operating a lab for ii years.

In the backwash, Theranos is reeling from lawsuits and criminal probes, and has abased its failed Edison device entirely, pivoting to its less ambitious miniLab device in an effort to pull out of freefall. Holmes may non have set out to defraud patients and customers, but she definitely gambled and lost. Walgreens is suing the company like a fat kid on cake.

The EmDrive

No, Virginia, we did not build a perpetual motility motorcar, and the EmDrive does not violate the laws of physics. The EmDrive is a theoretical engine that would, if it worked, exploit the conical shape of its cavity and use the energy of focused microwave emissions to separate pairs of virtual particles along some undefined boundary, fling the unpaired virtual particles out the back of the cone, and thereby generate thrust. Its underlying research and ideas accept (finally!) been published for peer review, and frankly, we need more optics on this paper because it's teetering on the fine line betwixt breakthrough and bullshit. (No, it's not — Ed)

em-drive-head

Objections to the paper's claims about the EmDrive come from all angles. There's no articulate theoretical workaround for the conservation of momentum here, and the virtual-particle ideas aren't clearly articulated. They built a tiny tabletop scale model that only operated at forty-80W, but it's supposed to run at megawatt levels, and they don't address whether or not their model tin exist scaled up. The reported i.6 μN of thrust accomplished at their maximum 80W operating ability might interpret beautifully to the intended megawatt levels, or that tiny amount of force might just be a wobble in the uncertainty; they say they got i.half-dozen µN of thrust, merely their own quoted experimental fault is ±six µN, guys.

In any example, their build needs to be tested by other scientists who don't have ties to the project, and information technology'll accept to be tested at scale before nosotros'll be able to build it into spaceships and apply information technology. We're debugging. Until there's been a great deal more peer review and external testing, I'm calling this well-meaning vaporware. If I'm wrong, I'll be in good visitor.

The Turing Monolith Chaconne

proxima-b-monolith-vaporware-phonethree SoCs. eighteen GB of RAM. 768GB of storage. 32 seconds of bombardment life (just kidding, it uses a 120Wh fuel cell). Hacker-proof. TROLOLOLOL. Turing Phones are conceptware that totally redefine wishful thinking. In a recent newsletter, Turing hopefully waggled its apparent R&D cred, and teased a pair of outrageously ambitious mobile phones, the Turing Telephone Cadenza and its "sibling" the Monolith Chaconne. To add together some visual flair, they shopped a mockup of their phone onto an ESO artist's illustration of Proxima b in orbit around Proxima Centauri, because space and planets and stuff. They didn't even bother to credit information technology.

But I digress. The Monolith isn't even on Turing'due south website. Instead, there's a affair called the Dark Wyvern, and a related DW Glaedr. Turing gave CNET prototypes of  a Turing Phone to handle, and they're anxious to collect preorders, but the prototypes were dummies running Android. Now Turing has no fewer than 3 theoretical devices in the works, and they're apparently as well conducting a project called the Outer Blueprint, which is supposed to "realize the side by side generation of mobile devices" by using a trio of Snapdragon 830s in parallel to give their phones the computing power to use robust AI. Just the claimed specs continue reaching skyward, and the buzzwords and names go along dropping — and whatever it is they're featuring on their glossy, content-free website, it's always going to enter product real soon now, next yr, for sure.

turing-monolith-chaconne-specs

This is Turing's own PR prototype. And the dissimilarity is terrible. And who or what is A.50.A.N.? H.A.L.'s spiritual successor, I presume.

Are they crazy insane, or insane crazy? You lot decide:

With a growing need for sophisticated bogus intelligence, the computing power needed to facilitate the kind of AI we envision for consumers of all types is much more what is currently bachelor in the market. Nosotros besides believe distributed calculating is the manner mobile technology is heading, hence our exploitation of the concept of multiple CPU integration.

TRI plans on connecting multiple CPUs via WiGig by implementing an ad-hoc driver to the 60GHz channel via on-lath USB3.0. This complicated calculating procedure stores a transient matrix in SSD of CPU(1), so it recomputes and shares the transient matrix with the other SSD of CPU(ii) simultaneously. This results in the CPUs sharing their computing power in parallel. Such proprietary applied science enables TRI to accomplish never-seen-before computing ability on a mobile device.

That's our personal vaporware listing for 2022 — got any products you recollect qualify? Sound off in the comments below.