Five mobile technologies that didn't change the world

Computerworld - It's an awesome time to be a gadget-happy consumer electronics freak. Multi-touch user interfaces. Huge advances in miniaturization and battery life. Cloud-based storage. Mobile computing has never been better.

But sometimes, when companies announce incredible new products or technologies, and everybody proclaims that a new era has dawned, and that culture-shifting transformations are about to take place -- nothing happens.

Here are five mobile technologies from last year that were supposed to change the world, but didn't.

Siri

Apple seemed to do everything right with its voice assistant strategy.

The company acquired the leading app maker with the best technology. It spent two years perfecting and integrating the technology, and bulking up on servers to handle the number-crunching required to deliver human-like voice interaction.

Siri was then launched to huge fanfare.

Overnight, people changed how they interacted with their iPhones. Instead of calling up an app, they just pushed the iPhone button and told Siri things like "Send a message to Steve and tell him I'll be 10 minutes late," or "What's my next meeting?"

It was great for a couple of weeks. But then Siri became unreliable, telling users that it couldn't access servers, or couldn't process their request right now. Even successful queries took a lot longer than they once did.

Everyone thought the glitch was temporary, and that Apple would quickly build capacity to deal with the load. But nearly five months later, Siri still can't be counted upon.

And a lot of people say Siri often doesn't understand what they say.

Instead of getting better, Siri seems to be getting worse.

As a result, many users have wandered away, and gotten out of the habit of turning to Siri for help. A USA Today poll, for example, found that about half of all iPhone 4S users don't use Siri anymore.

Yes, the technology is still officially "beta." But overall, Siri so far is a huge disappointment.

webOS

Less than two years ago, HP paid $1.2 billion to acquire Palm Computing -- with its Pre and Pixi phones and its webOS multi-touch operating system.

Palm technology had always been promising, but it had been stymied by a lack of vision and fickle decision-making.

Many Palm fans were thrilled that HP acquired Palm. Sure, it was a mostly enterprise-facing company. But at least HP would provide long-term stability and consistency for the platform.

A year ago, HP announced that it would use Palm's webOS platform on all HP mobile devices. It announced a couple of webOS phones. In July, it announced the HP TouchPad tablet.

The tablet wasn't great, and it failed in the market. But the webOS interface was ideal for tablets. Surely future versions of the TouchPad would be great.