[potatolicious]

I wouldn't call it "ahead of their time". Being ahead of its time means that some critically necessary pieces that the product really needed didn't exist yet, but companies stubbornly went ahead and tried anyways (e.g., streaming video during dialup days).

A lot of these failures weren't hinged on the lack of some technology, it's just plain bad execution.

See: N-Gage. There was nothing preventing them from building a perfectly viable handheld game console that was also a phone. It was just horrifically engineered. Same story goes for the ROKR - it was not all technologically infeasible to create a phone tightly integrated with iTunes and music playing... but they just sucked at it.