CNN: Antennagate Biggest Tech Fail of 2010 (Ping’s In There, Too)

It was June, summer was about to start, we just bought our shiny new iPhone 4s…and the Internet went crazy about what eventually got the name of “Antennagate”. You remember this story. The “weak spot” of the iPhone 4 which, due to a new antenna design, can make the device lose signal when you’re holding it in a specific way. Again, this is not something we’re going to forget easily. Perhaps one day we’ll tell our grandkids “I was there”. Whatever.

Still, CNN thought it was time to bring the whole Antennagate thing to the surface again and name it the biggest tech fail of 2010. We tried to bury Cupertino’s most favorite scandal deep down in our minds; CNN makes it clear that 2010 in tech was all about Antennagate:

First Apple said the problem didn’t exist. Then they said it was a software issue. Then they kind-of admitted it existed and gave away free cases to help. Then, they said it doesn’t really exist anymore and stopped giving away the bumpers. Months later, the problem is all but forgotten and the phones show no sign of dipping in popularity. So “fail,” in this case, is a pretty relative term.

Antennagate is not alone in the chart, though. 3D TVs made the list as well (seriously, I haven’t seen one or heard of a single friend of mine who bought / considered buying one) together with the Nexus One, the Microsoft Kin, Facebook’s privacy issues and the Gawker media security breach. Looking back, it looks like we had a great 2010 full of interesting tech stories and theories.

There’s only one sad point: Ping is, again, listed as one of the fails of 2o10. I feel bad for Ping: no one likes it. It just needs…a little bit of everything.