Top 10 worst mobile technologies

Last week we counted down the 10 best mobile devices and services of the past few decades. This week we look at some of the worst.

It should be said that the 'top 10 worst' lists are a lot more fun to write than the 'top 10 best' lists. Fawning over successful devices gets a bit repetitive, and after a while you feel more like a salesman than a journalist. Scepticism and schadenfreude is much more fun.

The mobile industry has produced some real stinkers in its time, but if there are any you think we've missed the comments section is below.

Honourable mention: Twitter Peek
Shaun Nichols: Twitter has become a pretty big deal over the past couple of years. It seems that just about everyone in the western world has signed up for the service and shared their innermost thoughts 140 characters at a time.

Despite its fairly limited use and huge user churn, Twitter is generating a ton of buzz and hype. Among those who have bought into that hype are the makers of the Twitter Peek.

The $99 device allows you to post tweets while on the go. Unfortunately, that's all it does. You buy the handset and then pay a monthly data fee to do something that just about any decent smartphone handset already does. If you're like the majority of people who sign up for Twitter, the Twitter Peek will be little more than a paperweight within a month.

Iain Thomson: I can remember laughing really quite hard when Shaun bought up the subject of the Twitter Peek at our weekly video news roundup. The idea that some idiots would spend money on a device to use Twitter alone was hilarious.

Twitter is explicitly designed to work well on mobile phones. Crucially, with a phone you can also make calls, access the internet and stay in touch. Why then do you need a clipped phone that performs just one function?

The Twitter Peek is for people who know nothing about technology (a fairly large market), have money to burn (a considerably smaller one) and are dedicated Twitter users who don't want to access the site on their phone (micro-market size). All in all we don't expect to see many sold.

Honourable Mention: Compaq Portable
Iain Thomson: We gave one of Apple's early attempts at a mobile computer a very hard time a few weeks back, but when it comes to lemons of the mobile computing sphere it's difficult to beat Compaq's first ever PC, the 'Portable'.

When the founders of Compaq formulated their plan to take on IBM at the Houston House of Pies they knew they needed a selling point IBM couldn't match. IBM dominated the market with the 'no-one ever got fired for buying IBM' ethos of the day, so they came up with the Portable, which was basically a desktop PC with the screen built in and a carrying handle.

Quite frankly they should have added wheels. At 28lb this behemoth would put you in traction and the 9in green screen wasn't exactly the best thing to spend a day staring at.

Still, it was popular, selling over 50,000 units and putting Compaq in line to become one of the leading lights of the forthcoming PC revolution.

Shaun Nichols: It may not be a cell phone, and it's hardly what most would call 'mobile', but there's more than enough to put the Compaq Portable on this list.

In terms of hardware, the Portable wasn't that bad. It sported 128Kb of memory, a pair of floppy disc drives and a relatively small price tag. The big problem was that it wasn't really portable. The gimmick may have been nice, but in terms of practicality you could save yourself a fair amount of money and just purchase a regular desktop computer.

Still, the fact that it came along a good seven or eight years before true notebook systems actually appeared keeps the Portable limited to our honourable mention section.