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In today’s day and age, a lot of effort is required to make terrible products, in the truest sense of the word. The nine gadgets highlighted below were massive turn-offs for tech enthusiasts in the year that passed.

Ring Video Doorbell

Ring’s pioneer Video Doorbell initially seemed promising, allowing couch potatoes and security-conscious residents to see who was standing at their front door. Probably no one imagined that Ring would establish a partnership with the police to assist them in confiscation of footage. The company also launched an app for neighbourhood monitoring which enables suspect profiling and has terrible network security. Today, Ring is a private surveillance firm owned by e-commerce giant Amazon.

Moviepass

Many viewed Moviepass as a sham but in 2019, it actually proved to be one. It stopped people from certain movie screenings, prevented password-changing options and because of inadequate safeguards, leaked the credit card data of almost 58,000 users. After a lot of struggling, MoviePass finally called it a night in September 2019.

Garmin MARQ™ Smartwatches

Smartwatch manufacturers such as Apple and Fossil aren’t going to put up Rolex or Tag Heuer for any mentionable challenge because they’re quite frankly… ugly. Garmin’s MARQ™ smartwatch line were manufactured in a way to bridge this gap as they were made from titanium and sapphire crystal while retaining smartwatch features with very good battery life. Unfortunately, Garmin preferred to retain reflective LCD screens instead of OLED technology. This made it almost impossible to see with the sun overhead.

Intel Comet Lake

Intel’s recent launch of Ice Lake is based on the 10nm processor which is the fastest they’ve ever put in a laptop before. Supply of Ice Lake struggled to meet demand so the corporation released yet another iteration on the 14nm processor, Comet Lake. The processing speed is pretty nifty but the graphics output, compared to Ice Lake, are disappointing.

Samsung Galaxy Fold’s Screen Protector

Who would have guessed that removing a meagre polymer film from Samsung Galaxy Fold would diminish the Galaxy Fold’s functioning? Apparently, Samsung did. Removing the polymer film created a host of issues forcing the company to delay production of additional units for five months before a workaround was developed.

Somnox Sleep Robot

‘Sleep tech’ has become a trending phenomenon over the past couple of years. The Somnox Sleep Robot is a bean-shaped pillow which mimic’s human breathing to help you fall asleep. As it turns out, spooning a robot bean is more than just awkward, especially when you include audio tracks. It’s quite a hard and rigid pillow. It’s suitable only for extreme insomniacs.

Dyson Lightcycle™ Desk

The Dyson Lightcycle™ is a good lamp with a chic design which can automatically adjust colour temperature based on time but at a cost of $600, it’s too much of a bargain! The sky-high cost doesn’t make it a resourceful purchase.

Ember’s Travel Mug 2

The Travel Mug 2 is a fine insulated smart mug with built-in display, touch pad and even a dedicated app to regulate the temperature of your drink and maintain the desired state for three hours. But the pricing at $180 makes it a useless buy considering it isn’t as better than a regular $20 travel cup. You’ll still need a kettle to give Travel Mug 2 an initial reserve of heated water.

Sonos Move

Fans of Sonos kept urging them to release a speaker which could stream audio over Bluetooth but, unfortunately, the speaker quality is terrible. Sonos Move ‘looks’ and ‘sounds’ okay but it just can’t compete with the plethora of Bluetooth speakers out there at a fraction of its price.