Friends, followers, subscribers, we gather together once again in this place of gadget worship, which is really just the dark corner of the CNET studio to pay our respects as we say goodbye to the gadgets that we lost this year.
We start our Memorial with G Bo, a lovable Smart Home assistant that helped answer your voice command questions He had facial recognition be captured company and he did a little dance on your countertop.
Founded by MIT roboticist it raised $3.5 million with an Indiegogo campaign in 2014.
But it didn't ship until 2017.
And it costs $900.
It was competing against the cheaper smart speakers from Amazon and Google, which So the disconnected robot assistant was delivering news of its own death to owners.
I want to say I've really enjoyed our time togther.
Thank you very, very much for having me around.
Maybe some day, when robots are way more advanced than today, and everyone has them in their homes, you can tell yours that I said hello.
I wonder if they'll be able to do this.
[MUSIC]
This was a tough year for companion robots.
On key also power down.
It's the company behind Vector, an advanced toy like counter top robot that interacting with your voice commands.
Vector relies on the cloud for updates and voice command processing, and so far The little guy is still functioning until they sever the connection.
You may also remember his older brother, Cosmo.
He was more of a toy.
Both had big personalities and reminded me of a character out of the movie Wall-E but these robots cost around $200 to $250.
Vecter may not have done a lot around the home but it did navigate its way around our heart.
Here is another robot that folded Well, it also actually folded the laundry folding robot long droid is no more after spending year after year showing off its massive machine.
CES.
This was designed to fold clothes for you at a price of $16,000.
And it took five minutes to fold a single item.
As you can guess it never went to mass production.
The company behind it filed for bankruptcy.
But the dream of never having to fold your own laundry lives on in another machine.
2019 we saw an early look at the foldy meet with time will tell if it will fold like the other folded.
Home helpers aren't always robots.
Sometimes they are strange little buttons that bring you more toilet paper.
This is the Amazon dash button and it met its end when Amazon turned off the capabilities of all dash buttons worldwide in August.
The idea was you would get a button for an item that you bought all the time.
And when you were running low, just hit the button and it auto delivered more to your door.
There was a button for almost anything.
It was cute in 2015.
But now who needs a button when smart speakers do so much more?
Some products die before we even get to know them, like apples airpower.
There was a wireless charging map that was announced in 2017.
Was supposed to charge multiple Apple products at the same time and be able to help those devices communicate with each other to manage power consumption.
The company said it would arrive sometime in 2018.
But after a long delay, Apple this year said they're canceling the project altogether.
Whereas we never got to know airpower.
There's one piece of tech.
I bet you didn't think lasted this long this year.
The pager beeped its final beep in Japan.
Since fist introduced 50 years ago, the pager was still being used in Japanese hospitals.
But the country's last pager service shut down the radio signals in October.
Pagers are still in use in the UK's National Health Service, but they will be phased out in 2021.
At least we'll still have fax machines, right?
This year we also bid farewell to a few smart home virtual reality headsets.
Google stopped selling the Daydream View headset and Google announced there is no plans to support Daydream in future android devices.
It wa sa good two year run up against Oculus and Google helped get folks interested in VR.
are then Dr. We may not know which trends of today will kick the bucket of tomorrow But until then, enjoy the tech wallet last kids.
I'm Bridget Carey.
Good luck surviving the next decade.
