Go Go Gadget Vaporware!

or that was vaporware, or that never was. It gets complicated, and in our next episode we're going to focus more on software. So what exactly is vaporware? Vaporware is a future product that someone has announced, but one that is not yet available for purchase and possibly never will be available. These are products that could still be in development, or they could be in a design phase, and they might never see the light of day. So vaporware is kind

of a you can't call it a definitive classification. Not everything or remain vaporware. Some stuff may eventually emerge from vaporware to become an actual product. Some stuff may ultimately collapse in on itself, and you could say, well it was vaporware because it never came out. But vaporware itself

is sort of a transition. Now, you don't want your product to be classified as vaporware because that comes with it some pretty bad implied messaging, things like we have the intent to bring this product to market, but we don't know how to yet, or wouldn't this product be a great idea give us your money. So vaporware is not necessarily something you want to have associated with you

or your products. And uh, this episode is sort of a preview of some stuff I'll be talking about in upcoming episodes for tech Stuff, because we are fast approaching episode one thousand, one thousand episodes of tech Stuff, And in that episode one thousand, I'll be dedicating a discussion about critical thinking and skepticism in general and how we

can apply those skills towards technology in particular. And then I planned to do an episode about hoaxes and scams in technology stuff that was pretty clearly uh a falsehood from the beginning, And I need to be clear that vapor where is not necessarily a falsehood. There are many cases where companies and people probably believe they were going to bring this product to market and it just didn't happen. So I don't think that all vaporware I list in

this episode represents an outright attempt to deceive people. Like I said, some of them may have been, but I'm willing to extend the benefit of the doubt and assume that most, if not all, of the products that I will be talking about, we're actually supposed to come out at some point, and they just did not for various reasons, uh legitimate reasons. As opposed to this was someone who is just trying to scare up a whole bunch of

money really quickly. And I've talked extensively about some examples of vaporware in their own episodes, notably the Phantom game console. I did a full episode dedicated to that, but here's a quick refresher. The Phantom was supposed to be a video game console that relied exclusively on digital delivery. You would download games to your console directly over the Internet, and the idea was ahead of its time, and some of the folks in charge of the company had a

bit of a shady reputation. But I still think that a lot of people who were involved on the Phantom team had every reason to believe that the thing they were working on would one day become a real product. I can't say for certain the folks at the top shared that belief. They may have been running a scam the whole time, but I know people who were attached to it really thought that they were working on something that was going to be an actual consumer product. At

the end of the day. The phantom never or fist, which led to a lot of jokes about the phantom never materializing. But since I've done a full episode about that product that never was, I'm going to look at other gadgets that were promoted at some point by a company but never actually became a thing you could actually buy. So, sticking to the realm of video games, that is a a wealthy treasure trove of examples of vaporware, even if

you're talking about the hardware side of things. Let's talk about the retro VGs a k a. The coll Eco Chameleon a k a. The Retro Chameleon. This vaporware game console gives proof to the old adage if it seems too good to be true, it probably is, although again

not necessarily meant to be a way to fool people. First, this console was meant to be a cartridge based game system with no connectivity to the Internet, kind of like a throwback to the old classic cartridge based game systems, things like the Atari twenty, the coll Eco Vision and tele Vision, the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Super Nintendo, the Nintendo sixty four, the Atari Jaguar, all of these cartridge

based systems, and the value proposition for this device. The selling point was that games were going to be complete experiences the moment they hit store shelves. They would have to be because the whole game would have to exist on the cartridge. There was no way to patch or update games. There's no way to get downloadable content because

the console itself would not connect to the internet. The developer for the console argued that this would be a return to the old days of gaming, where a player could be assured that the title he or she picked up was a playable, complete game. There'd be no need

for a day one download. So this was sort of a response to a trend in video games where you go out, you buy a brand new game, and whether you have a physical copy of it or you buy it digitally, once you installed on your machine, immediately the machine searches for a download and arts to download a day one patch. Why because the game when it went out, when it shipped, when it went gold, was not actually

complete and the developers were still working on things. And while the game had been mastered and sent out, uh, they were still working on code to make sure everything was playable, patching bugs, fixing things, um, all that sort of stuff. And a lot of gamers get sick and tired of this. They think, well, by the time the game comes out for purchase, it should be a complete game. I shouldn't be waiting for another patch to make the

game I just bought playable. So this game console was kind of a response to that, saying we should create a console that forces game developers to create a full game from start to finish. There's no way to patch it, there's no way to update it, so they have to be certain that their game works. They have to test it, and then they have to go through the whole manufacturing process. There's no way to just deliver the code. You actually have to hard code the game onto cartridges, which actually

puts up a pretty big barrier to entry. It's not a cheap thing to do. Cartridge as though, have their benefits. They allow for some pretty fast load times. For example, there's no need for a an optical drive to locate a point on a on a disc and read information off of it. Cartridge games load very very quickly, but they also tend to have a limited storage space on them, and the retro console designers said that their special fpg A circuitry would allow for all sorts of retro based gameplay.

F p g A, by the way, stands for field programmable gait array, and it essentially means that there's an integrated circuit in this device, and it's a blank slate. It can be configured by the end user. That's what the field programmable part comes from. That you can program this blank circuit in the field to make it do

whatever it is you need it to do. So, in this case, the console itself would be an f p g A and the cartridges would contain the information that would essentially reprogram the console to make it behave like a specific type of console to run the code that's on that cartridge, whether it's emulating an S and E S style game or an Atari Jaguar style game or something like that, not that it was meant to play

those old games that wasn't the point. This wasn't a clone console where you could shove an old S and E S cartridge into the console and play a classic game. Instead, it was to create a new ecosystem based off that style of game, the old retro games. So you would be making brand new games based off that old style of game making, and they would have that kind of retro look to them and that retro gameplay field to them,

but they would be brand new titles. Originally, the project was pitched to kick Starter in early twenty team, but the team chose instead to port the project over to indie Go Go, allegedly because they did not have a working prototype to prove their hardware was actually feasible, and by Kickstarter was starting to get a little wary about tech based projects because there had been some pretty high profile failures on Kickstarter. I'll do an episode about that

kind of stuff in the near future. So the company would cancel the indie Go Go campaign about a week in because it became clear the campaign was not going to have the momentum they would need to hit their goals. They had some pretty lofty goals, and while they raised something like eighty thousand dollars in their Indie Go Go campaign. Eighty thou dollars within a week was not tracking for

them to actually hit their goals. Typically in crowdfunding campaigns, by the way, you make the most of your money in the very first week and the very last few days of a campaign. The middle section tends to be pretty quiet, So if you don't have a huge amount of momentum going into your campaign, you're probably not going

to hit your goals. Well. The team would eventually show off a prototype of this retro video game system and the New York Toy Fair in February, but the only games they showed off were old S S n E S titles and they were plugged into a case that looked like in the old Attari Jaguar. They said, well, we got the molds for the Atari Jaguar, and that's what's going to be the casing for our our new console. But folks began to suspect the team was just using an S and E S circuit board that was housed

in a repurposed Attori Jaguar case. A second planned kick started campaign failed to launch in that same month, the

February sixteen. The company then posted a photo of what was said to be an early build of the console that which was now branded the Colleco Chameleon, And in the photo there was a clear case and you could see the circuit board inside the case, which I thought was a pretty cool design choice, except for the fact that people began to point now that the circuit board bore a striking resemblance to a CCTV DVR video capture card.

They were actually naming the specific card it appeared to be, So this was not a a console motherboard or circuit board. It was instead a card that you would put into a computer in order to give it DVR capabilities. So then that image, that promotional image, disappeared from the company's social media accounts, but the damage had already been done.

Collico demanded that their branding be removed from the device after the console team was unable to provide for Colico a working demonstration of the gadget, and the whole project pretty much fizzled out at that moment. Now, again, I don't want to suggest that this console was a scam or anything, although there was some very questionable choices that were made to show off these devices that clearly were

not the retro video game system. It may well have been that the team in charge really one to create a console that catered to a certain breed of gamer, and they just kept running into challenges during the design phase. Perhaps they made some extremely ill advised decisions to showcase stuff that wasn't their actual design, all in an effort to keep support going for a project that was in

danger of failing due to lack of funds. So, in other words, they just were trying to get more investment until they could catch up and actually produce the thing they wanted to make. But whether they made those choices poorly due to an act of desperation, or they were trying to fleece gamers, the result is the same. It never became a reality. Next, how about the Sega VR headset. In nineteen eighty nine, Sega had released the Sega Genesis in the United States. Uh that system had already debuted

in Japan in nine. It was called the Mega Drive there. In fact, the Mega Drive is pretty much what the rest of the world calls this particular gaming console. In the US, we called it the Genesis. But Sega was doing really well for itself by the early nineties and In nine, the company first announced it was working on a home video game system peripheral that would be a VR headset. Now, at the time, virtual reality had generated a lot of buzz and excitement. This was back during

the first real frenzy around virtual reality. This was the one that would eventually result in a bubble collapsing in on itself and destroying an entire group of technologies for about a decade, but in VR seemed like it was gonna be the next big thing. So Sega had a big prototype to show off in nine at various trade shows, and it planned to release the consumer model in At

least that's what they announced. The headset featured a pair of l c D screens and speakers that would fit over your ears, It had sensors for head tracking, and there were at least a few games that were in development for the peripheral, and then Sega stopped talking about it.

I'll mention of the VR headset disappeared. Later, the company would claim that the problem was that the experience of the headset delivered was just too darn realistic, and that there was a year that users might hurt themselves while wearing the headset because everything was two gosh darn real

when you wore it. But some people said that maybe there were other issues at play here, such as some problems with head tracking, the resolution on the screens might not have been very good, or maybe there were real problems with latency that tends to lead to a nauseating experience in VR. Latency is that lag you experience between performing and action and having something actually happened in a game.

So an example in VRS that you're wearing the headset and you turn your head to the left, and then a half second after you turn your head, your view starts to change, and there's that lag between what you see what you've done, and what you actually see happening, and that kind of gives you this sort of uncomfortable motion sickness. It's very off putting. But we never had

to put off Saga VR headsets because they never came out. Well, I've got a lot more vaporware to talk about in just a minute, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Back in the ES, a personal computer debut that in many ways left competitors like the Macintosh and the various IBMPC clones in the dust. And

it was called the Amiga. It was the brainchild of a designer named J. Minor, who had worked for Atari and designed the chip set for the Video computer System also known as the VCS and also known as the Atari twenty hundred. Minor had advocated for a new machine running on more advanced chip sets, but he met with some resistance at Atari, so he left the company and eventually he landed at another company that had the name Hi Toro, and that company wanted to make a video

game console, and so he started work on it. And his idea was, I'll make a video game console that can also act as a personal computer. I think that would be more interesting. I just will downplay the personal computer stuff to my boss is because they're really gung ho on this whole video game console idea. But then in three the video game market totally crashed, the home video game market. That's when all the consoles started going

out of business. There was a glut of terrible, terrible games on the market, and everything collapsed in on itself. So then the owners of hy Too were panicking. They said, could you maybe instead of making a game console, could you make a personal computer? Because personal computers seem like they were immune to this problem they could keep going, and Miner said, well, here's the good news. That's what I've been doing the whole time. I've been working on

creating this personal computer that also could run games. And the company also discovered that Hi Toro was a name that another company had over in Japan, so they decided to rename themselves Amiga. Commodore, the company behind the insanely popular Commodore sixty four computer, would end up acquiring Amiga in night four. Amiga was just on the verge of

running out of cash at that moment. They had not yet been able to produce a computer and they were in danger of going out of business when Commodore came in, and then Commodore was able to pour some more money into the development of the Amiga, and the Amiga computer became one of the best machines to own if you loved sound and graphics. Came out in nineteen eighty five,

and people who bought an Amiga, they loved it. The games that came out for the Amiga seemed to be world's ahead of the games you could play on IBM clones or on Apple computers. But despite this, the computer itself in sales was a distant third place behind IBM clones and Apple computers, especially when it came to software.

Commodore would eventually have to declare insolvency on April twenty nine, nineteen nine four, and a German company called s Com swooped in and acquired the Amiga assets, and for a brief time it looked like there was going to be a new Amiga machine that was going to come out in nineteen and while the specs weren't particularly mind blowing, the case was pretty darn cool, and this was called

the Amiga Walker. The Walker is a little tricky to describe. Physically, the case stood on four little feet, so it didn't sit flat against the ground. It actually had these four little peg feet. It was a squat rounded tower design, and some people said it looked kind of like Darth Vader's helmet. It was a forty Mega Hurts machine with a sixty eight e C zero three zero processor for Motorola, so it was not sporting the hardiest of processors at

that time. The specs would have made it a pretty decent computer maybe in the early nineties, but by nine when it was going to come out, it would have already have been obsolete compared to the hardware on other machines. As it turns out, it never did hit store shelves. It never emerged from the vapor, and one day I'm going to have to do a full series on Amiga to talk about the history and evolution of that company

in more detail. I've talked about it a couple of times in the past, but never in as much detail as the subject warrants, because it's a fascinating story. Transitioning over to film, let me talk about Silicon Film and the e F S one product, because this was another

really interesting idea that did not quite materialize. So the company, which was originally called a Magic, announced in that it was working on a device that you could insert into a normal thirty five millimeter film camera and turn your

film camera into a digital camera. This was at a time when digital cameras were still pretty expensive, especially a digital s l R, and it would allow photographers who had invested hundreds or thousands of dollars in their film cameras and their lenses to take advantage of that hardware while switching to the digital side of things. At least

the concepts seemed to say as much. The initial claim was that the company's first product, the electronic film system unit called e F S one, would fit into any thirty five millimeter camera and it would call us less than a thousand dollars. The specs revealed the sensor would not be able to take full advantage of a film cameras field of view. It would only capture about thirty five percent of the full frame yikes, less than half.

It had a one point three megapixel s MOSS censor, so not terribly high resolution, and enough memory to hold two dozen images at twelve eighty by ten twenty four resolution in uncompressed format. So it wasn't exactly a killer set of specifications, but still it was an interesting idea for a product. The problem was that years went by and the company had nothing to show off for it.

Remember they made the announcement in and it wasn't until two thousand one, three years after that initial announcement, that representatives attended the p m A show and demonstrated the e F S one. The following September, the company had to stop operations when a majority stakeholder pulled funding due to issues The company was facing with European environmental standards agencies. As it turned out, the e F S one was never capable of working with any thirty five millimeter camera.

It only worked with about half a dozen Cannon or Nikon cameras, and then it was not compatible with the others. But the company had hopes of making other systems that would have increased compatibility. It just never was to be. In the meantime, digital SLR cameras have become more attainable, and that largely negated the market for a digital adapter incapable of taking full advantage of a camera's features. So, in other words, they took too long to bring their

their device to market. They had announced it and they got some interest early on, but by the time they were getting ready to have something to come to market, the the alternatives were more attractive and easier to get. So bad timing. One gadget I do have to talk about was supposed to come out from Polaroid several years ago, and I'll need to do a full episode about Polaroid

at some point because that's another fascinating company story. Let me give you the super short version of this particular tale. In two thousand eleven, Polaroid was trying to mount a late innings comeback. The company had been in pretty rough shape twice over the last decade or so. But to

understand where they came from. In nineteen thirty two, Edwin Herbert Land, who was the inventor of instant photography, partnered with a guy named George Wheelwright to create the Land Wheelwright Laboratories, and in nineteen thirty seven that company would become Polaroid, and for decades the company was known as an innovator and popularized photography. It was the it was the company that brought photography to the average person. And

of course their work inspired a song. Obviously you probably are all thinking about it's in that classic line and hey yeah, and which we're told to shake it like a Polaroid picture. By the way, shaking instant film does not make it develop any faster. So you can shake it like a Polaroid picture. It's just I'm not going to make the picture developed any faster, but it might get you some some appreciative looks on dance floor. Anyway. One thing Polaroid was a little late on was adopting

digital camera technology. They were sticking with film for the most part, and as a result, they were starting to fall behind in the market. That might be one of the big reasons the company found itself in financial trouble towards the end of the nineteen nineties. In two thousand one, Polaroid would file for bankruptcy protection and it would stay in protection until two thousand six, but then its parent company would have to file for bankruptcy protection in two

thousand eight. So there were stretches of years during those times when Polaroid wasn't making any products at all. There were no new Polaroid cameras coming out or being manufactured. Instead, the name Polaroid really only existed as a brand name, something that could be licensed. Flash forward to two thousand eleven, right, so the company is trying to re establish itself. It's trying to make this big comeback, and it had secured

booth space at CS two thousand eleven. I was actually there that year, and in fact I visited their boot that year and they had something interesting on display. It was a digital camera in the form factor of sunglasses, and it was a product linked to Lady Gaga. Lady Gaga had joined Polaroid in two thousand and ten as a creative director of specialty products, of which these glasses

were an example. And the glasses included not only a camera lens, but also a pair of l c D screens inside the glasses, so you could see the pictures you snapped. And there was an earpiece on the glasses that had a USB drive attached to it that served as the storage device for the glasses, so you could store a certain number of images on them. They're supposed to come out during the holiday season in two thousand eleven,

but they didn't. In fact, they never came out, though several online retailers had pages set aside for pre orders. Eventually Lady Gaga would leave Polaroid, and no telling if it was because someone tried to poker face Pap Pap, Pap poker face. Next, I'll talk about touring phones, all right, So come and listen to the tale of the Touring Robotics Industries, a company that intended to rise from the

ashes of Nokia in Finland. And if you've listened to my Nokia episodes, you know that the famous cell phone branch of the company moved over to Microsoft before effectively getting shut down. Touring Robotics Industries set up shop in an old Nochia manufacturing facility, and former Nokia employees were the founders of this company, and they had high ambitions. They planned to make luxury smartphones and their first such

device was called the Touring Phone. Originally, it was meant to be a secure communications device, and if you were to send and receive messages on a couple of these touring phones, you would be certain that all communications were safe because they were using end to end encryption on the devices, which would theoretically make it impossible for a snoop to see what you were sending back and forth. If they if they intercepted anything, it would be meaningless gibberish. Now.

Originally the company wanted to use Android as their operating system of choice for the phone, but when they were eventually able to ship a working model several months after the originally planned ship date, the operating system was Sailfish, which was a little known Linux based operating system for smartphones. And when they shipped these it wasn't really the customers.

They mostly sent them to reviewers. They only a few Touring Phones ever made it out to people who had pre ordered them, so they never were really widely available. They didn't and they certainly didn't get to everyone who had backed the company. But some of those early builds did get to reviewers, who I have to say, did not have a lot of good things to say about the device. At least one of the reviewers ruined a

review model because they dunked it into water. The actual touring phone was supposed to be able to withstand such treatment, as supposed to be water resistant, but turned out the review models that were sent out, we're not built on that specific hardware specification. Yet. They were working with the Cellfish operating system and they had the software on them, but they weren't the actual hardware handsets, and so the

review model was ruined. The company kept talking about other phone models in the various design and production phases, with frankly unbelievable specifications, such as a sixty megapixel camera, which is insane, or hydrogen fuel cell batteries, which people have talked about, but no one's really used those for cell phones as far as I can tell. These uh these concepts had names like the Touring Monolith Shakne and the Touring Phone Cadenza. None of them ever came to market.

People who pre ordered the phone received an unfinished build of the Touring Phone, which was really just meant to be a temporary solution, but it never became less temporary. The same was true for what would have been the second phone to actually make it out of the manufacturing facilities. That one was the Apaschea Nato. Only a beta version of the handset ever made it to reviewers and a

few early customers who had pre ordered the phone. This one ran on Android, not sail Fish, and the security features that were so central to the original Touring Phone were absent in this one. In February two, Thoeen Touring Robotics Industries declared bankruptcy in Finland. The CEO, Steve Chow, said that it was a strategy meant to push pause

on business operations while developing a new approach. But general consensus seems to be that the company is put and no phone from them will ever be available for customer purchase. Now I've got a little bit more to say about gadgets that are vaporware. But before I do that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right, I gotta talk about a proposed Apple product that never came out, and it was a communications device. It was

actually a telephone capable of sending facts messages. It could recognize handwriting and had a touch screen and a stylus user interface. You could choose custom ringtones for it. But this was a landline telephone, not a smartphone that you would carry. You would actually have this plugged into the outlet in your house. And Apple announced it all the way back at Macworld. It was called Walt, and Walt was an acronym that stood for and I swear I'm

not making this up. Whizzy Active Lifestyle telephone. Boy, does that sound like an Apple product? Whizzy Active Lifestyle telephone. You can tell that this was not during Steve jobs run over at Apple. Is one during the time where

Steve Jobs was not at that company. Apple had partnered with Bell South on the design of this proposed product, and what appeared to be a production model, as in not just a prototype, but something that would have actually gone out to store shelves of this Walt telephone showed up on eBay back in two thousand twelve with a cool asking price of eight thousand dollars. And I found conflicting reports online about whether the auction actually went through,

or whether it was taken down early. I don't know what the case is. Maybe it actually went through and someone bought it for eight grand, or maybe for some reason the auction was taken down, but either way, the walt never saw the light of day on an official basis. Now, sometimes we actually will get a product, it's not true vaporware, but the product that we get is different from the

one we were originally pitched. Actually, that happens quite a bit, and if you're lucky, it happens in the good way, and that the thing you get has more features than what you were originally promised, and that's awesome, like you say, well, this is even better than what they were talking about before. But more frequently than not ends up being a case where you get something that has fewer or completely different

features than the ones you were promised. So to start off with, I want to talk about Vessel V E S S y L. This is one of those cases where you've got a lot of unhappy people ready to accuse the founder of the company mark one of shenanigans. That founder's name is Justin Lee. So what's the story. Well, Vessel was supposed to be a smart cup that could actually analyze the contents that were inside the cup using sensors.

The chemical analysis would include a nutritional breakdown of the liquid inside the cup, and then by pairing the cup with a mobile device via Bluetooth, you could keep track of your nutritional habits. And it was all part of this quantified self philosophy that was really a big deal just a few years ago, where people were trying to track and analyze all sorts of data about themselves, and some of us still do, like I still track all of my meals, and I still track all of my stuffs.

But this cup was supposed to be able to analyze anything you poured into it and then automatically send that information to a companion app. So if you poured soft drink into it, like coca cola or pepsi, it would identify that and say, here's how many calories you're consuming, here's how much caffeine, etcetera, how much sodium that kind of stuff, it would identify it as, whether it's coke or pepsi. Even at least that was the concept or of his fruit juice or coffee or whatever it might be.

The principle was supposed to be the same no matter what. Lee would start taking pre orders for the smart cup starting in two thousand fourteen at nine a pop, with the idea being that the eventual actual cup once it goes on sale, would be a hundred dollars, so essentially you get it for a hundred dollars off by pre ordering, and he raised more than a million dollars that way. The cup was supposed to ship in two thousand fifteen,

but it didn't. Eventually, his company issued a statement that said the cups were taking longer to produce than anticipated, that finding a sensor technology that would work for mass production was problematic, and that the company would instead offer

out kind of a stop gap. They wanted to offer up a cup called the Prime Vessel Prime spelled p r y m E. For some reason, the Vessel company likes to get rid of perfectly fine vowels and replace them with wise Anyway, this Prime Vessel would track how much water you drank in a day, assuming you use your cup for all your water drinking, which was a big step down from the originally promised gadget, and according to a statement from the company made to the Better

Business Bureau, anyone who chose not to get a Prime Vessel could request a refund. So, in other words, you you had a choice. You could say, I'd like my money back because you have not delivered the thing that you promised, or I will take this prime vessel in the meantime and I will keep waiting for the actual cup to come out. I should also note that unlike the promised vessel, the Prime model actually shut. A lot

of people had problems with it, but did shut. Whether all of the models shipped to all the customers, I can't say, but something did actually leave the company and go out into the world. In fact, you can find Prime Vessel on stuff like Amazon. The company, by the way, has since gone out of business. And while some people have essentially accused Mark One of perpetuating fraud, I'm not ready to do that. I am not certain that that's

the case. Justin Lee studied biomedical computing at Queen's University. He had a background in that field, and he partnered with a designer named Eves Bihar who had worked with jaw Bone to build wearables. I suspect that Lee was perfectly sincere in trying to bring this product to life, but he tackled a project that was far more complicated than he anticipated, not necessarily just technologically, but economically, and

that this might be an honest failure. I do think that, based off reading various forums and Reddit threads, that Mark one was not very good at communicating things and being transparent about what was going on, and so that ended up sewing a lot of discontent. I should also point out that there were lots of people who are skeptical that a sensor or even a group of sensors that could perform chemical analysis with any degree of accuracy in

the form factor of a cup would be unrealistic. So there's some who say there's no way this could work just because the technology doesn't exist. We don't have a technology that could work in that form factor. So this sort of fits in with the episodes I'm going to do later on critical thinking and skepticism, that concept of if something sounds really, really incredible, then you need to take a step back and look for the evidence that

supports those incredible claims. It doesn't mean that the claims are automatically false, but it does mean that they require that evidence to support the claim. At c. E. S two thousand fifteen, a new company called Emmiota captured interest

with their prototype product design. Here's a quick insight into c e S. C S is a show where you see a lot of the same sort of stuff year after year, and you'll see incremental improvements in that stuff, which is totally understandable, but it also gets a little boring. If you've been to ce S more than five or six times. There's only so many times you can look at a big wall of televisions and actually feel excited

about it. And so occasionally you'll run into a product that is outside the normal types of stuff you see at c S and you get really excited because it's different. Doesn't matter if it's a good idea or not. Necessarily, it just matters that's different. Well, in this case, the product that was a smart belt buckle that could automatically loosen or tighten the belt around your waist, so if you were to sit down or stand up, it could keep your trousers nice and snug without being uncomfortable or

presumably after you orch it yourself. Let's say you're at Thanksgiving dinner, it would be able to let out a little space, you know, loosen that belt a little bit. It also vibrate occasionally let you know that you've been sedentary too long and that it was time to haul yourself up to your feet and take a little bit of a walk. And a lot of folks also said it was really ugly as sin it looked more like a safety belt than a fashionable accessory. But then again,

this was a prototype that they were showing off. Then you flash forward a year and now it's c e s. The m Eota team was out again with Belty, only the new design of Belty was very different. For one thing, it looked more like a fashion item. For another, it had ditched the self adjusting feature entirely and no longer could tighten up or loosen by itself. Um Instead, it

would sync up with an app on a smartphone. Now would still vibrate to let you know you need to get up and walk around, and it would let you know if you need to drink more water to stay hydrated. I'm not really sure how that last feat was supposed to work, As the folks at Emiota said the belt would continue to give you notifications even if you did not have your phone on you. So how your belt happens to know whether or not youven drinking water is

beyond me. I don't know what the mechanism was supposed to be. For that the projected pre order price for this belt was the princely sum of three. Now let's flash forward again to today. You can order a Belty online. You can actually go out and buy one of these things. It costs a hundred forty nine dollars, so less than half of what the price was quoted as being back in two thousand and sixteen. But as far as I can tell, all the previous features are no longer part

of this belt. It does not tighten up or loosen up on its own. It no longer vibrates to let you know to walk around, doesn't keep track of your water consumption. Instead, BELTI acts as a supplemental battery. You recharge the battery it's housed in the belt buckle, and then you can plug in a device into the buckle for a quick recharge via USBC. So you can stand there with your phone plugged into your belt buckle and

it looks about as great as it sounds. So the product you can actually purchase is a far cry from the one that was shown off back in two thousand fifteen, and again that's just a demonstrate how vaporware might refer to a build of something and that you do eventually get that product, but it ends up being very different from the one that you were promised. It's always a smart thing to think of whenever you're looking into a

crowdfunding campaign. Will cover more about that in a in a future episode, but that wraps up this one about gadgets. In our next episode, we're going to take a look at the software side of vaporware. It's just as entertaining and varied as the hardware side. And uh, if you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a type of technology, a company, a person in tech, maybe there's someone you would like me to interview or have on as a guest host, send me

a message. The email address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com. Or draw me a line on Facebook or Twitter to handle at both of those is tech Stuff H s W. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram and I'll talk to you again. Really sit for more on this and thousands of other topics because at how stuff Works dot Com,