Right idea, wrong time: the tech that turned up too early

Sega’s Kinect

You plug it into your games console, it watches you move and it turns your wavy arms and kicking feet into killer kung-fu moves. No, not Kinect: Sega’s 1993 Activator, which Destructoid called “the crappiest game peripheral ever made”. The idea was sound but the implementation wasn’t: your $80 didn’t quite deliver the full-body tracking the ads implied – your movements were mapped to basic up, down, left, right, A, B, C and so on – and it was bulky, ugly and a pain to set up.

Seiko’s smart watch

Samsung’s Galaxy Gear is a very old idea: Seiko was making smartwatches such as the RC-1000 back in 1984. The RC-1000 was little more than a very simple PDA that you could control from a PC, but then again the Samsung Galaxy Gear doesn’t do very much either.

Apple’s premature iPhone

The MessagePad Newton was the iPhone a decade too early: battery technology was primitive, with early models sucking triple-A batteries dry in the blink of an eye; today’s bright, capacitive touchscreens were many years away; and wireless connectivity and mobile broadband were yet to deliver on their promises. The Newton was a nifty tool, but it arrived too early to be the world-conquering monolith that 2007’s iPhone would become.

The other USB

Firewire, Apple’s version of the IEEE1394 high speed serial interface, was designed to offer super-fast connections between devices. However, while it was early to market in the late 1990s, some odd decisions – three different kinds of connections and, from 2002, two different standards (for example Apple offered Firewire 800 in its higher-end Macs but limited consumer models to the slower Firewire 400) – made it easy for USB to catch up and ultimately overtake it.

USB 2.0 overtook Firewire 400 in the speed stakes, and the 2008 USB 3.0 standard eclipsed Firewire 800 completely with performance measured not in megabits, but in gigabits.

Sir Clive’s BMW i5

In 2013, car fans are getting excited about a zero-emissions vehicle powered by electricity – but in 1985, they were chortling at exactly the same thing. We’re the first to admit that 2013’s BMW i5 is a much faster, safer and sexier vehicle than the Sinclair C5, but Sir Clive’s ahead-of-its-time invention remained the world’s best selling electric vehicle until 2011.

O2’s iPhone

It looks like a child’s toy now, but the O2 XDA (2002, also known as the HTC Wallaby) felt pretty groovy at the time: it managed to combine a colour PDA with a proper phone, web browsing, email and a touch-screen interface, and it was solid enough that you could use it as a weapon to bludgeon your enemies to death. 2005’s XDA IIi was a veritable cornucopia of connectivity: three-band GSM, GPRS, Bluetooth, MMS, SMS, Infrared and 802.11b – but reviewers slammed the Windows Mobile operating system, which was far from intuitive. 2007’s iPhone ground Windows Mobile into the dust.

Polaroid’s Vine

Short, sharp video clips are everywhere thanks to services such as Vine, but Polaroid got there decades before: its Polavision came out the same year as Star Wars (1977) and enabled you to record quick video hits. Unfortunately it came out just before Betamax and VHS did the whole video thing much better.

Powerline networking

If you’ve encountered powerline networking – moving data via your home’s electricity cabling – you’ve probably seen it in the form of HomePlug, but while the HomePlug Powerline Alliance has been around for 13 years the CEBus standard was developed a full sixteen years earlier. Unfortunately it wasn’t very quick: average data transfer speeds were around 7Kbps. Today’s Powerline kit (pictured) is almost 1,000 times faster.

Apple almost invents the World Wide Web

Bill Atkinson’s Hypercard, which came out in 1987, was the first commercially successful hypermedia system. It organised data into cards which you could navigate around, or browse, and data in one card could be hyperlinked to data in another. Its very versatility made it hard to market, but a system based on very similar principles was unveiled four years later and did pretty well. That one was called the World Wide Web.

Microsoft’s iPad

There’s a sad irony to the damage the iPad is doing to Microsoft’s Windows business, because Microsoft was in the tablet market first. Nine years before Apple unveiled its tablet computer Microsoft had manufacturers making Tablet PCs, portable devices with touchscreen interfaces. They bombed for several reasons – price, Microsoft trying to cram an entire desktop operating system into a tablet; touchscreens that wanted pens, not fingers; bone-headed internal squabbling that meant Office didn’t work properly; and battery, touchscreen and wireless tech that wasn’t quite up to the job of all-day mobile use. Every time somebody buys an iPad, Steve Ballmer sheds a tear.