I don't see a lot of Rolls Royce's either,

I don't see many either, but I've NEVER seen a satellite phone, and they are far less expensive. Point is, by any economic or business standard, it is a total, complete, utter failure.

they're in movies & I belive the military uses them.

but you've got to look at it from a job perspective too: construction workers most likely haven't seen a beta tape since betamax, so they'd consider that an economic/business failure too. Just like most americans never see a farm.

If you work, live, or travel in areas outside cellular coverage or in areas with inadequate landline service, then you might see them. Because of the size of the antennae and the cost of the service, you're not going to see people using them just for idle chit chat (like we all do now with cell phones).

Iridium alone currently has 150,000 subscribers. So some folks apparently feel they need a sat phone, despite the cost and awkwardness of the phones.

Sat phones are Huge in the yacht business, not just the G4-G6 domes you see on the boats themselves but handhelds as well.
$ per minute aint cheap but these guy dont mind. I just finished config a phone \ Data set up on a boat , uses an ISDN router and still has relativly slow speeds. $8.00 a minute to surf net while out at sea....
Course he told me, that having the abilty to watch his stocks he could recoupe the $$$ in hardware and minutes in one shot.

Must be nice

RE: Satellite phones

Iriduim was a business failure. So was the company that laid all the fiber from the US to Asia (can't remember the company name). I classify them as business writeoffs. Designed from the start to place infrastructure, then loose billions of dollars, only to be swept up by the big guys for cheap.

Iridium satellite phones worked great, as long as you didn't go inside of a building. Now there is a huge business opportunity to extend the satellite phone coverage from "everywhere" to the inside of buildings where they matter.

We use satellite phones in hospital technology support, and they sure got a lot of use the past couple of years during the hurricanes in SE USA. Our teams deployed them from across the country to Florida. My cell phone company's tower is 300ft out my back door, and it took 5 days to get it turned back on. Because most of the SE US land line phones went through a Sprint switching station in New Orleans, it took about 10 days to get reliable landline phones. My cable modem connection, also through New Orleans, still is intermittent since Katrina.

So satellite phones in general are very useful, and they are worth it when you need to use them. Just the initial build out was a debacle.

Great list, agree.

I'm gonna add one more: the Maxtor One-Touch external drives.

(I'll be nice and not add sony's vegas media manager to the list :)

ken

That's right, DRM at work.... If the player can't determine that the display device will "honor" the content restrictions, meaning any HDTV built before a certain date, it will only output a castrated signal.