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Game Gear and Sega Nomad. Game Gear had a more advanced screen and color options than the Gameboy Color 8 years prior (1990 vs. 1998), a backlight 13 years prior to the GBA SP (2003), and the landscape form factor that nearly every system since the GBA has used. It even had a TV Tuner attachment, and an adapter to play Master System games. It also eats 6 batteries in about 2 hours, actually rendering some longer games nearly unbeatable, as well as requiring a bag to carry around, whereas Gameboys fit in large pockets. The Game Gear was ambitious, but probably too ambitious for its own good. The Sega Nomad has all that, plus it's a home/portable console in 1995, over 20 years before the Switch. Same caveats apply as the Game Gear.
Apple Newton In 1993 Slovakia separated from the Czech Republic to form two separate countries, while Bosnia and Serbia were at war, and Jurassic Park hit the theaters at the same time as Sleepless in Seattle, and the Hubble telescope got fixed by the Space Shuttle Endeavor crew. NCSA Mosaic is released, and the very first web sites began to appear on the World Wide Web. Most people won't even have their first experience with the web until 1997, when AOL first allowed users out of their "walled garden", and would let them load web pages from other non-AOL web sites. Meanwhile, Apple released a handheld computer with an enormous screen, handwriting recognition, and great battery life. It was, in every way, a completely revolutionary product. The inevitable issues with any sort of handwriting recognition got overblown by a couple of high-profile detractors (Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury fame, for one), and the image of the product never recovered. But it was amazing. And brilliant. It was a platform, with extensible capabilities, like electronic forms and email and open apps that allowed you to build stuff. I remember it being used in the medical field instead of doctors writing on clipboards, and it was transformative. The wikipedia article I linked to above goes in to a bunch of detail about the legacy of the Newton... and how much of the technology we use in our smartphones today, either first appeared on the Newton, is built upon Newton tech, or built by the people who made the Newton happen. Without the Newton, we would still be using Blackberries today, and thinking they were hot shit cutting edge tech.
I ported Doom to BeOS back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I'm still convinced that if they'd gotten a Maya/Houdini/whatever port they'd have gotten the SGI refugees that eventually settled for OsX and survived. On the same note, Tcl/Tk. It's sick and wrong from a programming language geek perspective, but it's still the easiest way to do all the parts of software that suck and bends over backwards to make it easy to use something else for the interesting parts.
Minitel Free terminal given to every citizen to access an online service. It was heavily monetized, mostly with porn and chat room (social network) To this day I dont get how the French didnt have a leg up on how to monetize the internet when everyone was wondering how to make money out of the internet in 2000
I'm not sure PCP was ever a good idea. I've heard plenty of stories about it and none sound like it's a good time. Apparently it was developed as a painkiller, we already had painkillers at the time and it was immediately obvious that it had fucked up side effects
Know why "cherry" tastes more like "red" and "grape" tastes like "purple?" Back in the glory days of organic chemistry they were spitting out aromatic hydrocarbons like Willy Wonka. And some of them were real, and some of 'em weren't. Vanillin - that one synthesizes easy. But benzaldehydes are only sorta related to real flavors. Nonetheless, we got all sorts of flavors that taste more like color than they taste like food. PCP was one of a class of analgesics that got cooked up because there was a promising molecule. It had some nasty side effects. So they tried it on horses. But it wasn't as useful on horses as other horse tranquilizers. But it's easy to synthesize and its effects are highly desirable by a small class of consumers. So it's not fair to say it was never a good idea. It just wasn't a great painkiller and let's be honest: it hasn't been used in a non-illicit environment since the mid '50s.
I humbly submit the Tapwave Zodiac and the Nokia N-Gage. One was a PDA meant to be a gaming machine, the other was a Cellphone meant to be a gaming machine. Both suffered from some questionable design choices, but ultimately they failed for a lack of consumer interest and an almost non-existent game library.
...because nobody had ever come up with a portable gaming device before? The Tapwave and N-Gage weren't "a good idea at the time" they were inadequate, derivative attempts to cash in on the dominant trend in portable electronics.
I'm aware of prior handheld video games, from Football and Basketball, to classic TIGER and Game&Watch LCD Games, to the Game Boy, Game Gear, Lynx, and Sega Nomad. I'm also familiar with the The Tiger GameCom, Neo Geo Pocket, Wonderswan, and the open source GP32 (which still sounds awesome to this day), as well as the Gizmondo. I chose the Zodiac and the N-Gage because they were two devices that tried to combine two different core functions. One a PDA that doubled as a game centered device, the other a Cell Phone that doubled as a game centered device, which again, seemed like a good idea. Unfortunately, both suffered from design problems and limited libraries, and as a result, suffered lackluster sales. The Gizmondo, while still technically having a GSM antenna, was at it's core a gaming only device, which is why I left it out. But yes, that machine was an embarrassing failure. I'm still waiting patiently for The Phantom to come out. Edit: Dude, this is a crazy article. Thanks for sharing it. Edit 2: Going back and double checking the specs, it looks like the Gizmondo was treading similar territory as the Zodiac. So it fits as another good idea, bad failure.
Look at it, though - you still can't make a phone call with a Nintendo Switch. Phones have become gaming devices because they fundamentally represent ubiquitous computing. Once you're carrying around a CPU, someone will monetize every.single.aspect of that CPU. From a hardware aspect, the n-gage was basically the Danger Hiptop but with a shitty keyboard. Yeah, the Hiptop wasn't considered a gaming platform... but the n-gage didn't have any games either so that's not really an advantage.I chose the Zodiac and the N-Gage because they were two devices that tried to combine two different core functions.
Because Nintendo doesn't want to capture the cell phone market and back then, they didn't need to try. They knew that their dedicated gaming consoles were guaranteed money makers and their expansive libraries and market presence more than made up for the lack of functionality. I remember the T-Mobile sidekick. I always thought it was pretty cool. When one of my social worker friends was in college they ended up taking American Sign Language for their second language requirements and they told me about how popular and useful these devices were for the deaf community back then. Since we're talking about functionality and weird designs, do you remember the Nokia 7280 at all? The thing didn't even have a numerical keypad. It was weird.you still can't make a phone call with a Nintendo Switch.