Five mobile technologies that didn't change the world

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.

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

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 at once meeting?"

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

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 instance, found that about half of all iPhone 4S users don't use Siri anymore.

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.

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.

But in August, HP executives did a complete about-face on webOS, saying they wanted to sell the Personal Systems Group, including the webOS hardware business. At the time in December, the company said it would release webOS in accordance with an open-source license.

If that doesn't sound like a long wait, consider that Google is activating some 750,000 new Android devices per day! Apple recently announced that it sold some 37 million iPhones while the forth quarter of last year. All these new Android and iOS users are buying apps and developing loyalty to those platforms. By the time any webOS handsets to tell the truth ship, it's going to be too late.

With its incredibly innovative multi-touch user interface, webOS had the potential to compete with iOS and Android and provide real research and a real alternative. Now, the future of the webOS is murky, delayed and broadly disappointing.

The great thing about wireless devices is that they're

The great thing about wireless devices is that they're, so then, wireless. As is no wires. Even the iPhone doesn't require physical connectivity anymore when synchronizing or downloading music, thanks to recent iCloud integrations.

It wasn't supposed to be of the same type. For a few years, "wireless charging" has promised to untether phones altogether. Just drop a phone onto a special mat, and it would charge through inductive coupling, via an invisible electromagnetic field.

Last year, it looked as if wireless charging might take over as the default way to charge a phone. This year, wireless charging nevertheless hasn't become a major feature on any major handset line.

The only big vendor to embrace it on a mainstream phone was Palm, which offered a very cool and innovative wireless charging station called the Touch Stone. Nevertheless that product line was terminated by HP.

The biggest proponents of wireless charging

Two of the biggest proponents of wireless charging, Duracell and Powermat , formed a joint venture in September to advance the cause of wireless charging. They offer a range of products for name-brand phones, including the iPhone.

But so far, these third-party wireless charging systems require very bulky cases. In order to gain the convenience of wireless charging, you have to lose the convenience of a small phone. Because they're aftermarket devices, they have to use the phones' charging ports, making them unavailable for conventional charging unless you remove the case.

The past two years

For the past two years, a company called Immersion Corp. has been demonstrating incredible haptics research -- systems that generate the buzzes and vibrations that can provide tactile feedback on handheld devices and peripherals.

The company says its innovation provides " high-definition haptics ." And it says mobile phones and tablets are key targets for the application of the innovation.

The haptics?

But where are the haptics? It's 2012 already, and our phones and tablets just buzz and vibrate. In order to be in point of fact intuitive and engaging, they're going to need the kind of haptics offered by Immersive.

The mobile computing landscape last year looked like it would be transformed by Siri, webOS, the $35 tablet, wireless charging and haptics. Nevertheless all of those technologies have failed to live up to the hype and promise.