CES vaporware: Awesome, unreleased gadgets

At their annual Consumer Electronics Show extravaganza, device manufacturers like to dazzle the crowd with cutting-edge prototypes -- but many of those "coming soon" gizmos never make it to market.

Skiff Reader

The Skiff Reader was meant to be the savior of newspapers and magazines. Prototypes of the bendable e-reader, flaunted at CES 2010, were impressive. Newspaper and magazine articles would appear on the 11.5-inch touchscreen as they did in print, with high-resolution photos, graphics and other design elements intact. The hardware was a thin sheet of stainless steel foil, so flexible that it could be bent nearly in half. 

Skiff promised to launch a digital store later in the year, but it never got the chance. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought out the company in June 2010 for its publishing platform. It had no interest in the hardware, which it killed. 

Polaroid's Lady Gaga line

 Polaroid execs created a huge spectacle at CES 2011, featuring the queen of flash: Lady Gaga, who was named the company's new creative director a year earlier.

At the show, Polaroid unveiled three products in its new "Grey Label by Haus of Gaga." The Lady herself described the trio for attendees -- and as The Next Web noted: "I've never heard point-and-shoot photography sound so confusing as I did when listening to Lady Gaga."

The first product Gaga unveiled was the strangest: a pair of face-swallowing sunglasses called GL20 Camera Glasses. They would capture photos and video like a regular camera, then display them on the glasses' LCD screens for others to see. Photos could be sent to a printer via a Bluetooth connection.

The next two products felt more like traditional Polaroid, albeit with modern touches. First up: the GL10 Instant Mobile Printer, which printed 3x4 photos wirelessly from cell phones. Rounding out the trio was the GL30, an instant camera with a retro design that harkened back to the Polaroid cameras of decades past.

The instant camera seemed most likely to be released, as it's Polaroid's bread and butter. But it never came out -- and, unsurprisingly, neither did the Camera Glasses. The GL10 printer went on sale in June 2011 for $170. It's now available for $100.

Commodore LCD

CES vaporware is a tradition that goes back for decades.

The Commodore LCD was a portable computer that debuted far ahead of its time, at CES 1985. Its namesake screen, which could fold down for easier portability, was capable of displaying 80 characters on 16 lines.

In a brochure for the LCD, Commodore boasted of the computer's "unparalleled array of built-in applications" -- like a word processor, file manager, calculator and spreadsheets. It also included a 300 baud modem "to send and receive information whenever you want, wherever you are." And it would even run on batteries if needed.

But Commodore never released the device, reportedly because company management felt iffy about the future of LCD technology and portable computers in general.

Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid

 Three months before Apple unleashed its now-dominant iPad, CES 2010 was full of tablet prototypes. The most unique: Lenovo's IdeaPad U1 Hybrid.

The U1 stood out from the pack because the tablet part of the device functioned as a detachable screen that could be popped into a case with a keyboard. The $999 hybrid was slated to include 3G wireless connectivity and run on a custom Linux-based Skylight operating system.

Techies drooled over the prototype, with CNET dubbing the hybrid form factor "a fascinating idea" -- but one that "sounds too good to be true."

That review turned out to be right. Just a few months after it unveiled the U1, Lenovo killed the project and decided to completely start over with an Android operating system.

Lenovo got U1-lovers' hopes up again at CES 2011, where it debuted a revamped prototype. This model included a LePad slate that ran on Android and a laptop base that ran on Windows. Alas, even the new version of the U1still hasn't made it past the prototype stage.

Windows tablet

The tablet-heavy CES 2010 started with a keynote speech from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Ballmer excitedly waved around a prototype of an HP tablet (then called a "slate PC") that would run on Windows 7. A few months later, in an October address at the London School of Economics, Ballmer said "you'll see new slates with Windows on them ... this Christmas."

But the 2010 holidays came and went without a Windows tablet. Ballmer completely avoided the T-word in his CES 2011 keynote, even when he introduced a new tablet-optimized version of Windows under development.

It's been two years since Ballmer's tablet proclamations. HP, Asus and Acer offer a few expensive Windows tablets, but no major consumer device yet exists.

Toshiba rocked CES 2010 with its Internet-connected Cell TVs, which came with massive computing power and a long list of cool features.

The coolest of all: Not only did the TVs show 3D content, but they also converted regular 2D programming into 3D. Plus, they featured a built-in video camera, microphone and software for easy video calls and a super-bright LED display.

Toshiba execs touted Cell TV as 10 times more powerful than the average PC, thanks to the gadget's eight-core processors.

The "ultrapremium" device sounded like a dream, and that's how it stayed -- at least for most of the world. Toshiba told CES attendees to expect a U.S. shipping date in September 2010, but it never materialized. The TV is available in Japan for more than $11,000.
Stateside, Toshiba plans to bring some of Cell TV's features to market with the new Cevo chipset. But details on that release, too, remain sketchy.

Motorola Xoom's 4G upgrade

Motorola's Xoom tablet was one of the buzziest product announcements to come out of CES 2011. Its 9.7-inch screen size and high resolution matched that of Apple's iPad, and it was one of the first Android tablets from a major manufacturer.

A few weeks after the show, Motorola promised it would upgrade the Xoom's Internet connectivity to the new 4G LTE cell network from Verizon. The upgrade was supposed to come sometime in the second quarter of the year, but details didn't trickle out until July -- and the news wasn't good.

First, the update wouldn't be available until September. In order to get it, customers would have to ship their tablets back to Motorola to get a new chip installed. The process was expected to take about six business days. And while no data was meant to be deleted, customers were still urged to back up their information ... just in case.

It was a clunky way to deliver an upgrade that was already seven months late. But at least it won't inconvenience that many customers: The Xoom's sales have disappointed, barely making a dent in the iPad-dominated market.