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It’s a sad truth: Not every great idea translates into commercial success. Some products launch “ahead of their time,” either because the tech can’t support the concept, or because the public isn’t ready to invest in such a radical idea.From an early interactive television to Nokia’s infamous N-Gage phone , we’ve taken a look at 10 such gadgets that the market just wasn’t ripe to receive, but the principles of which have since borne fruit for other brands.Take a trip down memory lane via our video gallery below and let us know your thoughts on these interesting examples of innovations that didn’t pay off in the comments below. 1. QUBE The limited geographical trial of the QUBE cable TV service from a subsidiary of Warner Bros was ahead of its time — almost astonishingly so. For example, if we described “an electronic survey to see what people watching at home think of the president’s speech” you’d think we were talking about a modern social media tool, but QUBE actually offered the service — back in the late ’70s . Thanks to a proprietary remote control, QUBE’s interactive elements included opinion polls, community auctions and a show that aired video footage of music groups. It asked viewers to vote for their favorites. With 30 channels, including 10 pay-per-view channels and 10 interactive channels, QUBE offered a way to interact with your TV never seen before — and not seen again for some years. The aim of QUBE was much like social media’s role today” “to create a faster method for groups to communicate and interact, across distance.” Despite its forward-looking functionality and relative success, the QUBE service cost too much to produce a nationwide rollout and it was subsequently shut down. 2. Polaroid Polavision This 1978 Polaroid invention saw a gap in the market for quick and easy video recordings of special moments with family and friends. The ability to capture “little peices of your life” and view them “by dropping them into a box” rings a bell with video clips uploaded online today. However, the Polavision instant movie camera, film cartridges and special viewer weren’t a commercial success and were discontinued just a year or so later. The home video recording market was to go through many changes in the ’80s and ’90s before pocket video camcorders, cellphones and social media. Ultimately, they all rendered Polaroid’s quick-and-easy vision a practical possibility for millions of consumers today. 3. Sinclair C5 British inventor Sir Clive Sinclair has been ridiculed for years for the C5, but hindsight is 20/20. In light of today’s greater eco awareness, Sinclair was really onto something. Launched in 1985, the electric vehicle had serious limitations, but boasted qualities we now look for in modern modes of transportation. After all, the car could run for five miles on a couple of cents — the majority of its power came from a battery. And at a cost of less than $1,000 (in today’s money), the vehicle was an attractive proposition. Today, larger cars have adopted eco tech. Furthermore, small electric town cars with limited range are driven in cities across the world. The C5 seems like a distant ancestor to such vehicles. Unfortunately, in spite of its advantages, the C5 was impractical for the British climate, and therefore suffered technical and road safety issues. Less than 13,000 of them sold. The company went into receivership the same year it launched. 4. Apple MessagePad/Newton Needing virtually no introduction, the infamous Apple Newton platform is the great-grandparent of the iPhone and iPad. Although expensive and a little buggy, the touchscreen MessagePad PDAs enjoyed popularity among many Apple fans, and have since reached cult status. Too niche and costly at the time to be sustained by Apple, the Newton platform and related hardware was axed by Steve Jobs. He instead streamlined the Apple product portfolio soon after his return to the company in 1997. Since then, of course, Apple has enjoyed astonishing success with its most recent touchscreen iOS platform. Incidentally, for those who still have a hankering for a Newton, the ” Einstein ” program offers an emulator. 5. The Netmachine Net PCs or Internet appliances such as the Netmachine (see commercial above), the Sony eVilla, the 3com Audrey or the i-Opener were a new breed of home computers launched in the late ’90s and early 2000s. They were “lite” computers, suitable for surfing, email and some multimedia applications. At the time, however, confident consumers were happy to pay the difference for a full-fledged system, making Net PCs a flop. Recently, the principle behind such simple machines has since seen a resurgence — first netbooks, then iOS and Android tablets and, even more recently, the new ChromeBooks. 6. Rabbit Phones As the commercial above will illustrate, a Rabbit home phone could make wireless calls when you were in range of a Rabbit transmitter. Thanks to poor timing, Hutchison’s location-specific telephone service was a flat-out failure. Although the telecom company had the license for such a system in the late ’80s, it wasn’t until 1992 that the service launched. By then, full-scale cellular networks appealed more to consumers than a location-based solution. However, by seeing the value in “hot spots” of connectivity, the Rabbit network’s premise can be compared to the Wi-Fi coverage most of us enjoy (and make VoIP calls via) today. 7. Sega Activator Microsoft’s Kinect is nothing new. In 1993 the Sega Genesis (or “Mega Drive” outside the U.S.) got the “Activator Full Body Controller” add-on. This plastic hexagon shot out infrared beams that, when disrupted, would produce action within the game. For this reason, fighting games such as Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter were obvious titles for the system. Sadly for forward-thinking Sega, the high cost and lack of software meant the Activator was not a hit (as was often the case with innovations in the fragmented 90s gaming market). Meanwhile, Microsoft has passed the 10 million sales mark for Kinect. Ouch! 8. WebTV In the mid-’90s WebTV sought to bring the world wide web to TV sets, allowing consumers to surf more than just channels. The subscription service was delivered via set-top boxes. Too much hassle for too little return meant WebTV was never a huge hit with consumers at the time. Nowadays we’re seeing more and more Internet-enabled TVs with tech already built in. Although we’re far from seeing an enabled TV in every home, it does seem inevitable that cable boxes of the future will boast connectivity. As a footnote to the this flop, WebTV was acquired by Microsoft in the late ’90s and eventually turned into MSN TV. 9. Nokia N-Gage Poor old Nokia. Back in 2003, before the iPhone or the App Store were even a glint in Steve Jobs’ eye, this Finnish phone company recognized a consumer demand for cellphone video games. Unfortunately, Nokia paired this clever innovation with terrible hardware. The original N-Gage handset was an absolute stinker. It felt bulky, looked ugly and suffered from several major design flaws. Changing games was a chore that required removing the cover and the battery. The mic was located on the side of the phone; users held the device sideways to speak. The inconvenience prompted the nickname “taco phone” and the catchphrase “side-talking”. In addition, the N-Gage had a portrait screen instead of landscape. And to top it all off, the buttons weren’t particularly well-placed. Subsequent models did develop some improvements, but due to poor sales Nokia dropped the hardware. Instead, N-Gage became the gaming platform for Nokia’s N-Series handsets. However, none of this was enough to save N-Gage, leaving the iOS and Android platforms free to mop up the mobile gaming market. 10. NSFW (NUDITY): Amstrad Video Phone British technology company Amstrad attempted to launch a home video phone in 2004. At that point, video phones had been a technical possibility for years — AT&T offered a “Picturephone” service as early as the 1960s. Amstrad felt the public was ready to embrace such tech. They weren’t. Many considered video phones highly invasive. Not to mention, idiotic advertising premises (see commercial above) did nothing to rectify that conception. The Video Phone failed. However, fast forward about a decade, where most of us think nothing of hopping on a Skype video session or taking a FaceTime call. Skip ahead for one more bonus slide about a product that definitely wasn’t ahead of its time. BONUS: And Finally, One That Wasn’t Ahead of Its Time — the MotorolaROKR E1 To round off our gallery of “good ideas that were launched too soon and flopped,” we’ll flip the coin and look at a product so crippled from bad design and functionality that it seems bizarre anyone would authorize its release. Take a trip back with us to 2005: Apple is on fire with its massively popular iPods, and Motorola is riding high on the success of the RAZR. Rumors abound that the two companies are in talks to collaborate on a cell phone — dubbed the iPhone. Apple calls a special media event. Fanboys and girls hold their collective breath as Jobs unveils the ROKR E1, an ugly, rebadged Motorola E398 candybar handset with — wait for it — limited iTunes integration. (And when we say limited, we mean it.) The ROKR contained memory capacity for just one hundred songs, included no dedicated media buttons and allowed for no wireless downloads. Despite its drawbacks, Motorola embarked on a star-studded advertising campaign; one of the ads can be seen above. However, with such crippling specs, (and the fact that Apple launched the iPod Nano the same day), the ROKR E1 was destined to fail. Why Apple ever worked with Moto on such a product, why they implemented it on such cruddy hardware, and why Moto accepted such limited integration remains a consumer tech mystery to this day… More Related Resources from Mashable – 5 Vintage Apple Products That Time Forgot [PICS] – 9 Notable Tech Flops That Live in Infamy – The Evolution of the Apple Mouse [PICS] – 5 Media Format Flops Destined To Be Forgotten [VIDEOS] – 10 Vintage Apple Ads That Time Forgot [VIDEOS] Newton image courtesy of Marcus Daniel For more Tech & Gadgets coverage: Follow Mashable Tech & Gadgets on Twitter Become a Fan on Facebook Subscribe to the Tech & Gadgets channel Download our free apps for Android , Mac , iPhone and iPad Continue reading