30 worst-named tech products (pictures)

Apple has a dud every once in a while, and Ping makes our list.

Asus has made a few strange hybrid products in its time, and you can pick your poison deliberating between the FonePad and the PadFone. The FonePad is a 7-inch tablet that also doubles as a phone (a true phablet if there ever was one). Meanwhile, the PadFone Infinity (pictured) is a 5-inch LTE smartphone that becomes a 10.1-inch tablet when docked into the included PadFone Infinity Station.

Casio's line of ultrarugged G'zOne phones offers a lesson in the hazards of playing around with Caps key on the keyboard.

Remember The Chumby, that plucky gadget that had a touchscreen, ran a series of widgets that let it act as a photo gallery, weather station, news source, calendar, and social-media feed?

We're still not sure about the six-legged octopus-like mascot and the Chumby name was just a little too cute for its own good.

Last year CNET blogger Amanda Kooser wrote about how Chumby had returned from the dead. Well, sort of anyway. The programming code for the Chumby Service was almost completely rewritten and restored (for a $3 monthly fee), but no new Chumby devices are being made. But you shouldn't have a problem finding one on eBay if you're hankering to get your hands on one, whether it be the original Chumby, Chumby One, or Chumby 8, which is still available on Amazon.

Discontinued in 2012, Cisco's Cius business tablet was pronounced "see-us." Some might pronounce it more like "tschuss," which means goodbye in German.

By George, we actually liked the Chestnut Hill Sound George when we reviewed it in 2007. It had a detachable remote that mimicked the iPod's interface and sounded good, too.

We're not quite sure why it was called the "George," but we seem to remember one of the company reps mentioning something about being the first of its kind and a George Washington connection.

The Cool-er stood for cool e-reader. It wasn't so cool, but it did come in a lot of cool colors.

Cuil was a search engine that forgot to find a good name.

Three Es all in a row do not make for a great name.

The Gizmondo was a portable gaming device that never quite made it to market but spent a lot of time in trade-show booths, which featured models wearing white Gizmondo T-shirts.

Grace Digital brings us this tongue-twister: Ecoxgear Ecoxbt. A few years old, it's actually a decent little waterproof speaker for the money. Just don't try saying it five times fast -- or spelling it correctly every time you mention it in a product review.

I am a watch. No, I'm not. I'm the name of an Italian company that makes a smartwatch with a dumb name.

The iMuffs are a Bluetooth headset.

Motorola had a thing for the letter X at the beginning of its tablet product names. We were OK with the Xoom, the first Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) tablet to hit the market in 2011. However, Xyboard was a mistake, and sticking the Droid brand in front of it didn't make things any better.

Should Motorola have stuck with the Xoom brand? Probably, and the irony is that overseas the Xyboard was referred to as the Xoom 2. Whoops.

When we did the initial version of this roundup back in 2011, some CNET readers wanted the Wii to be on the list (as well as the iPad). Sure, it seemed like a silly name at launch, but it grew on people over time. Alas, the problem with Wii U is not that it sounds silly, but that it doesn't sound different enough from the original Wii, so a lot of people don't think of it as a totally new product.

The mRobe certainly ranks up there as one of the worst-named products of all time. Once again, we think something got lost in the Japanese translation. Supposedly, an Olympus executive liked the idea of a product that you could come home to and slip on like a robe. (There was some comfort factor involved, if memory serves correct.)

As Jessica Dolcourt wrote: "One fish, 2 fish, red fish, blue fish. Oh sure, there's nothing wrong with the OnePlus 2 name, except for the fact that the company, called OnePlus, has named their phones 'One' and '2'. Good one, guys."

Meep is defined as "a short, high-pitched sound, especially as emitted by an animal or a vehicle's horn." According to Wikipedia it's also the primary vocabulary of Beaker, on "The Muppet Show." And last but not least it's the name of a tablet and line of accessories from Oregon Scientific. Kind of makes you want to weep.

Never a good idea to put a * in a name.

A few people queued up online to preorder the Plastic Logic Que e-reader. But they never got it because it never came to market.

Chinese for "life force," Qi is pronounced "chee." It's also an inductive charging standard developed by the Wireless Power Consortium (it allows you to charge a device by simply laying it on a "transmission" pad).

In theory it might seem like a good marketing ploy to name something with a term that requires a phonetic English translation, but in practice, it isn't. In the last year several Qi-enabled phones have hit the market and the standard is gaining some momentum after a slow start. HTC, Huawei, LG, Motorola Mobility, Nokia, Samsung, Sony, and others are working with the standard.

Netflix's sudden plan to split the company in two and change the name of its DVD delivery service to Qwikster didn't go over so well, and the company quickly nixed the name and put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

While it may be a little hard to separate the name from the ill-conceived launch, any way you slice it, Qwikster just feels off -- and not in a good way.

Samsung's Smiley phone actually had the famous smiley-face emoticon in its name. Bad idea all around.

Sony's Slingbox competitor actually worked pretty well, but "Location-Free TV" didn't quite make sense as a name.

I'm sure Sony's new $200 Hi-Res Audio compatible headphones sound pretty good, but their name is a bit of a head-scratcher: h.ear on.

That's pronounced "hear on" for the befuddled. Never mind that everything is lower-case. What exactly does it mean?

Chalk it up to a one of those ideas that sounded good in Japanese but didn't end up translating all that well into English.

Qriocity did not kill the cat. It was the original name for Sony's movie- and music-streaming service. Sony has since changed it to Music Unlimited. Not great, but much better.

Sony's break-dancing Bluetooth speaker, the Rolly, is pretty amusing to watch the first 10 times you see it in action. As a name, the Rolly isn't as bad as some on the list, but it has never been quite clear how to pronounce it. (Is it Roll-y or Rollie, like Rollie Fingers?)

There have been lots of poorly named MP3 players over the years. (Samsung Yepp, anyone?) However, TrekStor's iBeat Blaxx may go down in history as one the most unfortunately named tech products of all time after people accused the product of being racist.

Shortly after it launched, TrekStor CTO Gil Szmigiel, apologized for the misunderstanding and renamed the product the TrekStor Blaxx.

Oy vey, it's the Tivoli iYiYi.

Attention TV shoppers, try to remember the model name and number for all those top-rated TVs on CNET. Which is why we're giving out a special award for worst named product to all the TVs out there. For reference, the one pictured here is the Sony KDL-55W900A.

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