Some of the Stupidest and Worst Tech Products at CES 2009

CES 2009, a tech show that was held last week in Las Vegas, Nevada saw some strange and weird stuffs too at the exhibition, well.. from my perspective. I wasn't quite interested to put that on my blog besides some real and innovative stuffs but later I changed my mind and here I'm with that.

1. Fuel-Cell enabled Charger



What I expected was totally new Fuel-cell enabled devices, and what we got this year was just a Fuel-cell enabled charger. Fuel-cell enabled devices have been a buzzword since the early of 2003-2004 and no companies dared to bring the gadgets based on fuel-cell technology this year either.

Medis Technology brought the world's first, well yes,, something first based on fuel-cell thing, portable fuel-cell charger to charge your mobile phones, Ipod,etc. They claim during the emergency, it could safe life.

Operating this charger is somewhat different. Just squeeze this charger between your palm, shake it a bit to activate liquid energy in it, select proper charging adapter to connect to your phone and start charging. Sounds quite odd and this device is going to be sold between $30-$40 margin. This fuel-cell charger is not reusable by itself. It's just use and throw stuff.

If you ask me, even if they stepped into something new, this is not what we wanted. This is totally one of the nonsense products I've ever seen on shows like CES 2009. Grand Ma would require an energy on battlefield to operate this thing.

I would keep extra cell of fully charged battery instead of this thing or say I would keep battery powered traveler's charger. That's it.

2. iCap = Mp3 Player + Cap



I don't know what were they thinking when they came up with something like this. This iCap is basically a mp3 player and also has two speakers, a display, FM tuner, SD slot and voice recorder. With that said, it doesn't need head phones.

Now, the problem begins with it's open sound. It could be irritating for others. The sound would just vanish in loud noise area. Battery would drown faster than ever.

May be they might have thought to give a regular cap a techy look but it looks like a stupid gadget. Surprisingly, this thing is more than $100. What a waste of money.

3. Mini Speaker



If you've portable mp3 player, just put this thing in instead of headphone jack and you'll hear sound(well.. noise) coming from this tiny box. It has got on/off switch, usb port and regular headphone jack.

What do you think of this Lilliput speaker? I think it's another stupid tech gadget to own and looks very very awkward sliding it in mp3 player and listening sound off it. These companies think people are bunch of jerks and would easily shell out money on this kinda of shameful gadgets.

4. CellMate - Cellphone Holder




CellMate looks just ugly(..not that chick,she is super hot) and was on display at one of the CES 2009 stalls. It's not even a gadget or so, look at the crap holder holding your regular phone and sticking it by your ear forcibly is gonna hurt real bad. Who could have thought of this concept? A real stupid.

5. Electronic Cigarette



On May 2007, I wrote about e-cigarette. That time it was promoted in a way to help smoker quit their smoking habit. Now, look at the CES 2009, this Chinese Company has come up again promoting this product with the same notion i.e to help smoker quit smoking but they added one more thing in their display stall. This e-cigarette could burn nicotine liquid as well. They've nicotine refills on sale to burn through this e-cig thing. Why on earth would someone need this thing if he/she has to burn the same nicotine stuffs found on regular cigarette? Sucker !!!

6. Washable Keyboard



There was a funny looking guy who marketed about his company's washable keyboard at CES 2009. According to him, recent research found more than 60% bacteria resides on the surface of keyboard causing lots of people to fall sick. Myann.. these westerners have no resistance to generic bacteria and that's the reason they easily fall sick when they visit third worlds. These are the same people who spends millions of dollars on sanitation, which is good but at the cost of zero level of resistance of immunity to fight very common bacteria. It's irony but some CA based research centers are now helping people to gulp worms to create resistance as they confirmed too much sanitation is just as worse as too much unsanitary. This washable keyboard is just hilarious. Whatta time, you can now wash your keyboard with lathering soap and water., ha ha ha ha.

7. Powermat



Companies are always on a lookout to make people spend their money on their nonsense stuffs.

Powermat is basically a tray-sized magnetic mat which connects to power outlet through a wire. Their logic is one can charge any mobile devices wirelessly just by laying them down on the mat. Voila, it's charging without wires. Sounds good but there is a requirement, each gadget should be covered up with proper wearable adapter made for different devices. If you have an Iphone, get a wearable adapter especially made for it at $30(say), then you lay it down on the mat, it will start charging otherwise, it wouldn't. Powermat itself is speculated at $100. Imagine you've more than 5-6 mobile devices like that, you are one of an upgrading freak who keep changing mobile set every 5 months, then sure enough, you gonna get big hole in your pocket.

To me, this is one of a total nonsense and worst products ever seen at CES 2009.

8. Lenovo Thinkpad W700



I put Lenovo Thinkpad w700 in my list of stupidest products because I see no future on it's design. The specs are massive and Lenovo tried to pack in as much as it could. It's powered with 3.0 Ghz Core 2 Extreme Quad Core processor, upto 8 GB DDR3 RAM, 1 GB NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700M, RAID based HDD with SSD support,7-in-1 card reader including compact flash reader,5 usb ports,BD-RE drive etc.
The unique thing about this workstation laptop is it's dual display. The extended display just slides in/out from the side of the LCD monitors. This is the design I was talking about which is not a future proof at all and looks very blunt even if it feels innovative. I don't understand why they needed that extra extension since we can't do much about them except giving some space for Desktop widgets. It's totally a flaw design.
Another uniqueness on this laptop, is built-in Wacom Tablet. My wacom tablet needed space as big as my mouse pad and even then I felt lack of space to work with. Now, this laptop has somewhat given the space for wacom tablet in such a way that designers would definitely have to struggle a lot to work their way around. It's again the design and it's not gonna work for sure.

Now with so much features packed in, you need a good muscle to carry this behemoth.
This is priced at $3,400 to $4,200 based on configuration.

So, these are some of the stupidest and worst products that I've found at CES 2009. There were literally thousands of them out there. If I give them a place at my blog, I'll have to blog for whole month only for them. I don't wanna do that.

That ends my CES 2009 blabbering here.


Thank you for reading my post.