In 2011, technology gifted the masses with the magic of the cloud and 4G as far as the eye can see, but the year wasn’t without its disappointments. In fact, this year’s tech climate bore witness to some failures of truly epic proportion: From launch letdowns to billion dollar bungles, here are our picks for the biggest technology fails of 2011.

1. Android Tablets
Well over a year after the release of the first iPad, not a single company has managed to make a dent in Apple’s strangehold on the tablet market. When it debuted at CES at the beginning of 2011, the Motorola Xoom looked to boast all the trappings of a proper iPad rival: the sleek new Android tablet operating system, plenty of power under the hood…what could go wrong? But a few short months later, the Xoom and other would-be successful slates like the slew of Galaxy Tabs have all blurred together. There is still hardly a single compelling reason to buy a tablet that isn’t cut from Apple’s cloth — and the debut of the iPad 2 in March was just another nail in the coffin of Android latecomers the market over.

2. Facebook Timelines 
Hey, remember the Facebook redesign? The one that was announced to the Facebook-loving populace back in September? We barely do either: The world’s most visited social network has been caught up in a court battle over the rights to the name of its core new feature: the Timeline. We don’t care what Facebook calls it, but the company certainly let the cat out of the bag way too early on this one. After integrating the Ticker, its controversial real-time scrolling sidebar, our profile pages look as dull as ever. And when Timelines do eventually roll out, Facebook will face a double backlash: not only will the users who’ve been looking forward to the photo-centric redesign be put off by the false start, but the rest will be outraged all over again when things shift around on the social network.

3. iPhone 4S
While it’s no flop when it comes to sales figures, the iPhone 4S remains one of 2011′s biggest consumer letdowns. Earlier this year, Apple’s iPad 2 upped its prececessor’s appeal considerably, slimming the original slate down while speeding it up — but it’s tough to not be disappointed by the iconic company’s most recent handset. Apple’s newest iteration of the iPhone is certainly nothing to sneeze at — it’s still one of the fastest, best-looking smartphones on the block — but it’s no iPhone 5. After spending the better part of the year salivating over a reinvented iPhone with a larger screen, a thinner profile, and other untold Apple-flavored wonders, Apple aficionados were presented with the iPhone 4S — a nominal upgrade over the previous model that touted the now much-parodied Siri app as its main selling point. While Siri is a capable (if at times perhaps too capable) virtual companion, 2011 is still an off-year when it comes to the world’s must-have gadget. Patience is a virtue, and all eyes are on 2012′s iPhone to up the ante. 

4. HP TouchPad
 If any one product has ridden the proverbial rollercoaster this year, it’s HP’s tablet, the TouchPad. After buying Palm in 2010, HP bet the farm on its new lineup of mobile devices running on Palm’s well-loved webOS platform: the capable Pre 3 smartphone, the mini Veer, and the TouchPad — HP’s somewhat literal response to the iPad. The company was so confident in its mobile strategy that it even insisted that every new HP computer would come with a version of the mobile software next year — a pretty outrageously aggressive move, considering that HP cranks out more PCs than any other company in the world.

Things were looking bright for webOS, but after a mere month of lackluster sales, HP sent its barely month-old tablet to the guillotine and slashed prices dramatically enough to rouse consumer interest in the failed product. After throwing away $1.2 billion in acquiring webOS, HP ultimately handed the software over to the masses as an open source project — and that’s just the latest twist on what might be 2011′s most ill-fated gadget.

5. Windows Phone 7
After about a year on the market, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone with Microsoft’s new smartphone software in their pocket. A lackluster debut only turned into a yet more disappointing tenure: By the third quarter of 2011, Microsoft commanded a meager 2.7% of the smartphone software ecosystem. The computing giant’s considerable resources haven’t been enough to provide a compelling alternative to the iPhone or the veritable army of Android devices crowding carrier shelves. While the new mobile OS happily veered off from the path of Microsoft’s last mobile software with a vibrant new look and a handful of fresh ideas, Windows Phone 7 continues to be too little, too late.

6. 3D technology
The future might be now, but you’d hardly know it by taking a peek in the average living room. At the outset, 2011 looked like it might be the tipping point for 3D — after blockbuster hits like Tron stirred up popular interest in the third dimension, it only follows that consumers would want to tote that tech home with them, right? Wrong. Blame high prices, headaches, or goofy accessories, but at the end of 2011, interest around 3D television hovers around the same flatline as it did a year ago. And it isn’t just television: Nintendo’s 3DS handheld gaming console laced even some best-loved classics with an extra layer of (literal) depth, but sales didn’t even begin to approach the projected 16 million units the console’s idealistic creator intended to move by the year’s end.

Last week, Microsoft overhauled the Xbox 360. The update brought dozens of new features, but there was one I was particularly excited about: when paired with a Kinect, the new interface was said to pack voice recognition support pretty much everywhere.

As I noted in my initial Kinect review well over a year ago, the Kinect’s voice system was the one bit I found particularly disappointing. After finally seeing someone do something right with voice with Siri, the idea that the 360 might be getting a wonderful voice interface had me beyond excited.

Alas, it still sucks.

Now, lets get one thing clear: I really, really like the Xbox 360. It’s one of very, very few devices I consider a personal favorite. If I had to up and sell everything I owned, the 360 would be one of the last things to go. I’ve owned one since launch day, and have ran three of them into the ground since. Suggesting I have a bias against the 360 (as commenters are wont to do whenever we criticize anything) would be like saying Google execs have a bias against private jets.

But this new voice crap… yikes.

If Siri’s greatest strength is that it (generally) allows users to speak naturally, the 360′s newfound greatest weakness is the exact opposite: it requires people to speak like robots. Very dumb, slow-speaking robots who have no idea what they want until presented with a finely groomed list of options.

Take my battle last night, for example. I wanted to watch the TV show Grimm, which is available on Hulu.

How might I do this? “Xbox, play Grimm on Hulu,” right? Hellll no.

Without searching on Bing (we’ll get into that later), the process was: Turn on Xbox. Wait 15 seconds for the Kinect to start up. “Xbox, Quickplay” (only because I’d loaded Hulu recently. Otherwise it’d be a few more commands.), “Xbox, Hulu Plus.”, “TV.”, “Title A-Z.”, “View All”, “G.” (It hears “J”), “Go Back”, “G.”, “Next Page”, “Next Page”, “Next Page”, and finally: “Grimm”, “Resume Show”. 13 commands to do one action.

Why not just search in Hulu with my voice and be done with it? Because you can’t. You can bring up the search interface… which promptly tells you to grab your controller, because voice isn’t supported here. Because that process totally makes sense.

So, why not just search via Bing on the homescreen, as you now can? I tried. Oh, how I tried.

“Xbox, Bing Grimm”. Results: Anne Graham.

“Xbox, Bing Grimm”. Results: Andy Grammar.

“Xbox, Bing G-R-I-M-M”. Results: C’est ne ma’am. What the hell?

Now, that’s just an example of the interface’s failings; it’s not to say that Siri would handle this specific goal any better. While it turns up some third-party results (Yelp, for example) Siri can’t actually search for content within third-party apps at all. With Siri, however, I’m constantly being surprised with what I can do. With the 360, I’m constantly surprised by what I can’t. Siri can set my alarms, send my texts, find nearby businesses — and heck, it’ll tell me a joke. The 360 can’t even do the things it outright says it can.

To put it another way: in the 10 days since the new UI rolled out, I haven’t been pleasantly surprised by a voice interaction once. I have, however, given up on voice and reached for the controller more times than I can count.

Think of the Kinect’s advantages: it has access (in most cases) to a constant Internet connection with relatively massive bandwidth. It has constant power, rather than working around battery drainage. It’s running on an exponentially more powerful device, with (stand-alone!) listening hardware that essentially never has to move. The 360 never has to figure out what I’m saying in a crowded bar, while driving, or at a ball game; it just sits in my living room, with an absurd amount of power behind it.

The 360′s new voice interface should be twice as smart, twice as fast, and twice as surprisingly wonderful as Siri. Instead, it just makes me want to break my TV.

Microsoft will push out an update to Xbox consoles Tuesday, designed to get consumers to turn on the device every time they flip on their televisions, not just when they want to play games.

Though most gamers will notice a dramatically different interface, and some will take advantage of more advanced voice-recognition controls, the real significance of the update is how boldly the software giant is putting itself at the core of the TV entertainment experience. Microsoft is partnering with 40 content providers from around the globe to significantly increase the amount of live and on-demand content available on Xbox.

Over the next month, Microsoft will add content in the United States to the Xbox from Verizon’s FiOS TV, ESPN, and the Syfy channel among others. Next year, HBO Go and Comcast’s Xfinity on Demand will come to U.S. customers. Many of the apps from partners are only available to customers who purchase an Xbox Live Gold Membership.

Microsoft is also adding new programming to the Xbox experience abroad. Canadian customers will get content from Rogers Media, Maple Leaf Sports, and TMZ, among others. And new programming will roll out in Europe, Australia and Asia.

The newest iteration of Xbox software, which Microsoft first unveiled at E3 this spring, does away with the interface in which users scrolled up and down to hubs such as Video Marketplace or My Xbox. After they got to a hub, users could then dive deeper into each topic by toggling to the right to the specific content they wanted.

Microsoft has replaced that look with the so-called Metro interface that it first introduced with Windows Phone 7. It’s also designing the Metro interface into Windows 8, expected to launch at the end of next year. With Xbox, the Metro look starts with the content hubs–such as video, games, and social–displayed horizontally across the top of the screen. Selecting a hub shows the rectangular tile Metro-look. Each tile displays content, such as the latest games played or the hottest movies available on demand.

“The menu takes a back seat and the content comes front and center,” said Mike Suraci, Director of Product Management in Xbox.

Microsoft has also baked in deeper voice control of the console for consumers using its Kinect sensor. The Kinect is better known as motion-controller that gives gamers the ability to use gestures to play games. But Kinect also has a microphone array in it. When Kinect debuted last year, games could use their voice for some limited voice-controlled navigation.

The new iteration goes far deeper. Now users can jump from hub to hub with their voice and select games, movies, and other programming just by uttering the title. It’s not entirely intuitive, though. If a user wants to catch an episode of, say, “Breaking Bad,” they first need to go to the video hub to request the show. They can’t simply say “Breaking Bad” from the home screen.

Xbox also lets users search for content using Bing with their voice. They need to call out words in the correct sequence to make it work. To watch an episode of “30 Rock,” for example, users can say, “Xbox. Bing. 30 Rock,” and the console will display all of the available programming with “30 Rock” in the title. That includes the TV show as well as, for example, the album, “Greatest Hits: 30 Years of Rock” by George Thorogood & The Destroyers.

The results from those Bing queries also display content from Microsoft’s partners. The idea is to do away with the endless searches for content among the various silos of services. So searching for “Super 8,” for example, will give customers the opportunity to rent the movie from Vudu, which is Wal-Mart’s video-on-demand service, and Netflix, as well from Microsoft’s Zune marketplace. And Comcast subscribers will be able to find all of its video-on-demand titles from their Xbox, when its application debuts early next year.

The move could pull customers away from Comcast’s set-top box interface, essentially handing over control of that experience to Microsoft. But Marcien Jenckes, senior vice president and general manager of video services at Comcast, said the company needs to be make sure its offerings are available broadly.

“We should be everywhere that the consumer is,” Jenckes said.

Verizon has taken a different approach with Xbox. It’s putting 26 channels of live television–including Comedy Central, HBO, and Nickelodeon–on Xbox through its FiOS TV application. With only 26 channels, there are plenty of holes, including all the broadcast networks as well as popular channels such as Discovery and ESPN (though ESPNews will be available). So if users want to, say, flip during a The Daily Show commercial break on a Monday night to check in on the score of Monday Night Football, they’re out of luck with that application.

That’s largely a function of obtaining the rights from the various networks, a time consuming endeavor, said Verizon director of product management Joe Ambeault. But the company is working toward that goal.

“This is just our Day 1,” Ambeault said.

Ultimately, he sees a future where there won’t be a need for consumers to own set-top boxes. Eventually, consumers will get all of their connect from providers such as Verizon through Xbox consoles, Blu-ray players, and digital media gadgets such as Roku and Boxee devices.

That’s been Microsoft’s long-term vision for Xbox from the day it dreamed up the console more than a decade ago. The company has always wanted a beachhead in living rooms around the world. The latest iteration of the Xbox interface isn’t perfect. But it moves the company one step closer.