Vaporware 2006: Few surprises

Wired today released its annual Vaporware list and if you’ve been somewhat interested in tech there may be few surprises. Among the winners are the games Stalker : Shadow of Chernobyl and Spore as well as GT4 for PSP, the mobile applications Skype for Symbian and TivoToGo for Mac as well as general candidates such as "the" iPod killer and SED TVs.

A new entry in the list is Art Lebedev’s Optimus-103 keyboard, which received a lot of press lately. However, we feel that it isn’t quite the actual delay of the keyboard that motivated Wired readers to lift it into the list, but rather the inconsistent messages posted on the Art Lebedev blog, which make the Optimus-103 look like a very uncertain unpredictable product.

Almost disappointing is the number one Vaporware - Duke Nukem Forever. The game has been on the list since 2001, topping it three times. The surprises of the list are some absent high-profile entries, such as Windows Vista (which was originally scheduled for a launch in September 2006) or Gran Turismo HD/5.