Speaker 1: Every year when we come to the end of December, I hold a memorial for the tech. We lost the tech that died and shut down and was canceled. And this year, 2022, I have quite the list for you. Plenty of iconic tech medics and, but this year also, the list got personal for me because of a very special gadget Amazon killed, but not just killed bricked. And it affects my children. Let's get into it, shall
Speaker 2: We?
Speaker 1: [00:00:30] We started the year losing a gadget you probably already thought was long dead. On January 4th, all old Blackberry devices stopped working. It's dead. It's really, really dead now. Dead. Dead. So if you were keeping an old Blackberry in your junk drawer will better check if it can do anything because the company behind Blackberry stopped running the legacy services for the 7.1 operating system and earlier Blackberry 10 [00:01:00] software, as if any of us were still keeping track of what OS Blackberry is running. And there's always this little glimmer, this little sparkle of hope that maybe someone will buy the Blackberry name and remake something with a keyboard. A Texas based startup called Onward Mobility bought the license from TCL and it was gonna remake Blackberry as a new Android phone. And nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Not happening. Onward Mobility said in February that the [00:01:30] Blackberry 5G phone plans it had are dead and the company is shut down.
Speaker 1: People gotta move on from Blackberry. I can't keep talking about Blackberry being dead if you won't let it die. And this is the year 3G service is totally cap push at t. Shut off. Its 3G cell tower service and so did T-Mobile. Verizon waited until the end of the year to shut it all down. The few customers who still hold on to an old 3G phone could have gotten an upgrade [00:02:00] to something that can tap into 4g. Verizon was sending out old flip phones to customers phones made by TCL Nokia and something called Orbit. So it's nothing too hip. Just something to get folks by with a working phone. Sorry. If you still got an iPhone four with the 30 pin connector, yeah, that's useless. Just trade it in for flip phone. At this point in May, apple killed the last iPod. Apple discontinued the iPod touch, ending the iPod [00:02:30] product line.
Speaker 1: Another icon gone. And when it debuted 20 years ago, the iPod changed music forever. We had many versions. There was the mini, the nano, the shuffle, the model that we call the iPod Touch. Well, that was released in 2007 as a bit of an iPhone and iPod Hybrid, but it was overshadowed by the iPhone. The last time we got a new iPod touch was back in 2019. The next month after all that iPod drama, Microsoft fully retired [00:03:00] Internet Explorer 11. Another piece of software tech that you already thought was dead is now for real's, dead. It's even got a gravestone in South Korea. Check this out. A software engineer spent the equivalent of $330 to make it, only to kill it again by printing this on it. He was a good tool to download other browsers, dude, ouch. Little cruel. But it is a beautiful work of art for it [00:03:30] is a web browser that we all hold close to our young computer hearts.
Speaker 1: Uh, it was in our lives since 1995 and Microsoft pulled the plug on support on June 15th. Now we are at October. Google announced it was shutting down Stadia. That's the cloud gaming service. But Google is at least giving money back to customers, giving refunds for all hardware purchase through the Google store and all games bought on the Stadia store. The service ends January 18th and all refunds should [00:04:00] be wrapped up by mid-January. Stadia launched in 2019. It sold some solid games, but it just failed to evolve. But yes, you've been watching this video waiting for me to tell you. What's the personal thing? Well, it comes down to this big fella, the Amazon Glow. It's a product design for young kids to talk to their distant family members and read books and play games together. It's a very awkward shaped giant thing, but I explain it as a mix [00:04:30] of a video chat system with a video game system.
Speaker 1: I reviewed it and I liked it so much. I paid $300 of my own money to buy it so my kids could play in a new way with their grandparents who are hundreds of miles away. They could talk while reading animated books and playing puzzles and making doodles and playing card games and other simple silly activities. Kids see the video chat in front of them on a screen and a projected image is beamed down to the table below where kids are doing all [00:05:00] the touching and that's where they're playing games and interacting with content. And it's completely bananas. This is a bananas product, okay? I am not that surprised to hear Amazon is giving up on it after a year. Maybe they just didn't market it enough. You know, like it's, it's hard to get this concept across, but this kind of innovation you don't just see every day.
Speaker 1: And it brought out something different in my kids that they can't get from some FaceTime chat or an iPad game. It was really fun and [00:05:30] smart play with family. So yes, Amazon, stop selling the glow. Goodbye glow. Okay, I get it. And Amazon is refunding me all my money. It's offering customers away to mail the unit back to the company to keep all this hunk of tech out of the landfill. But what if I just wanna keep having it? I want my kids just play with it as a game system. Nope. An Amazon rep told me that win support ends on the last day of 2022. The system will not be able to connect to any of the books or games. It's a [00:06:00] four pound, 14 inch tall brick. That's the sad state of our current tech landscape. You don't even own the gadgets that you buy. They could just be remotely made useless. I hope companies do keep innovating new ways to connect with tech, even if it's weird, like the glow. We need new thoughts and hopefully these products don't just become utterly useless garbage in a year. If there is a service or gadget you loved that ended this year, let me know in the comments. I'm sure there's something I may have missed. Until next time, thanks for [00:06:30] watching.
