Abdullah Saeed, Year 12
In the past few years, technology has advanced immensely. We see new gadgets and devices every year which are technologically superior to their predecessors. However, there are technological items, which we will no longer see. The following is a comprehensive list of technology, which no longer exists or will become obsolete in 2016. Note that this is an abridged list and only includes more major technological advances
ChatOn
ChatOn, by Samsung was a supposed rival WhatsApp, introduced in 2013. Unfortunately, not many people used this application, and due to a small demand, Samsung killed their ChatOn application in 2015.
Amazon Firephone
In 2014, Amazon announced its first smartphone called the Firephone. Its software was a customized version of Android but it had no access to Google play services. Firephone had a huge emphasis on online shopping, and the retail price was unfairly high. In 2015, Amazon finally decided to no longer manufacture this phone.
LG Watch Urbane 2
This was the second generation of the very popular smart watch LG watch Urbane. LG watch Urbane 2 was the first Android Wear smart watch with 4G support. The pre-orders started in November 2015, but only lasted for 6 days, and no more pre-orders were taken due to a hardware issue. Since then, there has been no news of this smart watch.
Portable media players
Media players have been very popular in the last couple of decades. But since the dawn of smartphones, these have become obscure as smartphones have all the capabilities of a media player and offer even more features. As a result, the majority of people left their media players for smartphones. Most of the media player brands are now dead.
Discs
Portable discs are almost on the brink of death in 2016. They have been replaced by streaming services such as Netflix and Steam which are a lot cheaper and more reliable for fraud tracking. A computer manufactured in 2015 will not even have a disc drive, in fact, the MacBook Pro with the disc drive has been discontinued since 2012. In 2016, everything will done online without the need of physical discs.
Beats Music
Beats music was a music streaming service provided by Beats Electronics. In 2014, Apple purchased Beats electronics and is since then convincing subscribers to migrate to Apple Music, also a music streaming service. Apple will permanently shut down Beats Music in January 2016.
Every year we see new gadgets come and go and rarely appreciate their worth in our lives. Here, we pay respect to the technologies we lost in the last few years and pray for the future of technology to come.
