It’s also sometimes difficult to tell where progress ends and blunder begins, or vice versa. If you believe that Google Wave was a bad idea in the first place, you might think it was smart of Google to kill it this year–but if you thought Wave had promise, then it’s Google’s early cancellation that’s the gaffe.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that while the industry’s lame moments are…well, lame, they can also be important. Last year, I summed up a decade’s worth of tech screw-ups and came up with 87 examples. This time around, I’m covering only a single year–but I found 57 items worth commemorating. No, tech companies aren’t getting more error prone; I was just more diligent. And as usual, there was plenty of ground to cover.

Thanks once again to Business 2.0′s 101 Dumbest Moments in Business and, of course, to Esquire’s Dubious Achievement Awards for inspiring this. Here we go…

1. Following in the proud tradition of the SPOT Watch and Windows Smart Displays.

Three weeks before Steve Jobs unveils the iPad, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer pre-emptively shows off “Slate PCs” running Windows 7 at his CES keynote. He declares them “perfect–perfect–for reading, for surfing the Web, and for taking entertainment on the go,” but fumbles with the HP model he demos. The tablets fail to overcome the long-standing curse that has doomed countless Microsoft products announced during CES keynotes to oblivion.

2. I’m sure Dr. Land would be gaga over the news.

At CES, one-time consumer-electronics powerhouse and current mousepad kingpin Polaroid announces that it’s named Lady Gaga as creative director.

3. How come HTC didn’t demand, oh, $250?

Buyers of the Nexus One phone (manufactured by HTC, sold by Google) who opt for a T-Mobile subsidy but cancel service after a 14-day trial but before their two-year contract ends must pay $200 to T-Mobile and $350 to Google. On top of the $179 price they paid for the phone, that leaves them out a total of $729–or $200 more than they would have paid for an unsubsidized Nexus One in the first place. (Google later lowers its fee to $150.)

4. Sue it loud.

Kodak sues Apple and RIM over imaging patents.

5. The obligatory dumb-crook story.

Two days after Christmas, young reprobates in Wilsonville, Oregon steal a bunch of electronics, including two Motorola Android phones. One of the delinquents snaps some pictures of himself with one of the phones–apparently unaware that it’s running Lookout, an application that silently backs up all images to the cloud. Using the photographic evidence, the Wilsonville police make an arrest in mid-January.

6. Bad buzz.

Google launches Buzz, a Twitter-like service whose defining feature is that it’s built into Gmail, thereby turning Gmail users’ contact lists into social networks. It runs into immediate flack from users who don’t want their contacts to be made social or public. The company moves quickly but it takes several passes of fixes before the controversy dies down. And even then, Buzz never quite seems to catch on.

7. It’s not a Microsoft product name without at least one superfluous word.

At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft announces a radically new version of Windows Mobile. It’s impressive, but its name–”Windows Phone 7 Series“–doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. After nearly everybody who writes about the new version mocks its moniker, the company shortens the name to the more harmonious “Windows Phone 7″ months before the phones ship.

8. Conversations with myself.

Rabble-rousing InfoWorld blogger Randall Kennedy–who frequently cites data from Windows performance research company Devil Mountain Software–admits that he has a second identity: Craig Barth, CTO of Devil Mountain Software.

9. Hey, nobody likes being exposed to obloquy.

The makers of VoIP gizmo MagicJack lose their lawsuit against Boing Boing, which had published a post criticizing the product’s end-user license agreement (EULA) and pointing out that its Web site pretends to detect MagicJacks installed on PCs and automatically increments a counter that supposedly shows how many people have come to the site for a free trial. MagicJack, which had charged that the post had exposed it to “hate, ridicule and obloquy,” is ordered by a judge to pay Boing Boing more than $50,000 to cover the blog’s legal costs.

10. Sue city.

Apple sues HTC over mobile patents.

11. Let he among us who has never left someone else’s top-secret property behind at a bar cast the first stone.

Apple engineer Gray Powell visits a biergarten in Redwood City, California. He enjoys some fine German brews. Then he departs–and leaves an iPhone behind. An unreleased prototype next-generation iPhone.

12. And if any Nobel Peace Prize winners submit apps, we’ll put the kibosh on them, too.

An Apple App Store policy against iPhone software that ridicules public figures briefly results in the rejection of a satirical app by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Mark Fiore.

13. Que overdue.

E-reader maker Plastic Logic pushes the ship date for its much-anticipated Que ProReader–which looked pretty nifty when it was unveiled in January, three weeks before the iPad–from April to June.

14. Highly social twentysomethings aren’t all that demanding, I’m told.

Microsoft announces the Kin One and Kin Two, two phones with built-in social networking features. Reviewers question the decision to release Windows phones based neither on Windows Mobile 6.5 nor Windows Phone 7, squawk about the lack of an app store, and say that the need to commit to a Verizon smartphone plan is inappropriate given the phones’ limited capabilities. Microsoft executives counter that the phones are aimed at highly social twentysomethings and are therefore difficult for the typical jaded tech pundit to appreciate.

15. The good news is that you didn’t have a virus after all.

In certain circumstances, McAfee security software misidentifies a core Windows XP component as malware and deletes it, causing PCs to reboot over and over and over. The company’s initial response to the crisis strikes some customers as a tad blithe; later updates are more apologetic and less defensive.

16. Facebook? Making sweeping changes that impact user privacy without considering the implications? No, you must be thinking of another site.

At Facebook’s F8 conference, founder Mark Zuckerberg announces an array of new features, including a Like button that can appear on any site and integration with third-party services such as Pandora. Controversy over the changes’ effect on privacy rages for weeks, and proves hard to extinguish even after the site adds additional controls.

17. Um, that’s fewer tablets than Apple has sold so far, right?

Fusion Garage, maker of the ill-fated, poorly-reviewed JooJoo (née CrunchPad) sends out an e-mail to JooJoo buyers seeking their feedback on the device. The company puts all their addresses in the to: field rather than blind-carbon-copying them, so anyone who gets the e-mail can see who else received it. There are sixty-four recipients.

(Sorry, Plastic Logic: You don’t get to call a product “second generation” when the first one didn’t ship. The first Que turned out to be a failed prototype. The next one, if any, will be the first-gen version.)

The Que had an oversized E-Ink screen, a focus on business users, a slick user interface, and unique plastic-electronics technology. Plastic Logic never explained why it couldn’t release the thing when it thought it would–it may just have been that the company was far better at drumming up hoopla than it was at setting a realistic development schedule for an ambitious gadget. In retrospect, it would have been a lot more efficient if the company had decided it would need to start over back on January 27th, the day Apple announced the iPad.

It wasn’t just that the iPad turned out to offer more glitz, power, and versatility at a starting price $150 lower than the $649 cost of the entry-level Que. The rest of the e-reader industry seems to have settled on a strategy that’s more or less the opposite of Plastic Logic’s: The Kindle and its competitors are all getting cheaper and simpler.

The whole sad story reminds me of the tale of Palm’s Foleo–including the wistful promise of a second-generation version at a later date–except that Palm only showed off the Foleo once before canning it. Here’s a recap of how we got here:

September 2008: Plastic Logic shows off a prototype e-reader at the DEMO conference. Its big screen is unique. (Me: “potentially cool.”)

January 2009: Another preview, at the Consumer Electronics Show.

May 2009: The company demos again, at the Wall Street Journal’s D Conference. Amazon.com has recently shipped its jumbo-screened Kindle DX. (Me: “You can only demo an unreleased product so often, over a certain length of time, before it stops feeling fresh and exciting and runs the risk of being perceived as vaporware.”)

October 2009: The e-reader gets a name–the Que ProReader–and Plastic Logic says it’ll be “unveiled” at CES in January. A bunch of other e-readers have been released, and one is reportedly on the way from Barnes & Noble. (Me: “By the time it shows up, it may even be compared to an Apple tablet.”)

January 2010: The Que is indeed unveiled at CES. It looks impressive, but the price–$649 without Wi-Fi, $799 with–is well into laptopland. Plastic Logic says it’ll ship in April. (Me: “Que looks like it has the potential to be the slickest and most versatile e-reading device to date”)

March 2010: Release is delayed until “Summer.” By now, the iPad has been announced. (Me: “If the delay indeed ends up being a few months at most, it doesn’t seem like that huge a deal.”)

April 2010: It’s supposed to show on up June 24th. The iPad has shipped.

June 2010: A few days after it was supposed to ship, the Que is delayed “a bit longer.” Ominously, Plastic Logic cancels all pre-orders. (Me: “It’s tough to imagine it thriving whenever it does appear.”)

This week: The Que is canceled altogether.

(The company isn’t saying what exactly it’s trying to improve about the gadget; when I tried one back at CES, I liked the look and feel of the user interface, but found it to be alarmingly sluggish.)

In normal times, delaying an interesting product by a few months might not be catastrophic. But just about everything about e-readers has changed since CES: We’re now in the iPad era, and the best-known dedicated e-readers now sell for under $200. The QUE still has some theoretical virtues–a big screen, long battery life thanks to the use of monochrome E-Ink, a focus on business use that includes content licensed from famous brands, and that slick interface–but it’s tough to imagine it thriving whenever it does appear. Certainly at $$649-$799, and maybe at any price.

If the delay indeed ends up being a few months at most, it doesn’t seem like that huge a deal. If I were a prospective customer, I’d surely prefer to wait a few months for a rock-solid Que than get a buggy one right away. Besides, a little extra time doesn’t mean much given than the company started previewing the Que in September of 2008 (and in fact was talking about using its technology to make e-readers as far back as 2000).

The real question about the Que and all other e-readers that use monochrome E-Ink screens is whether they’ll survive the technological sea change that seems inevitable when Apple releases the iPad on April 3rd. Even setting aside the fact that the iPad is a multi-function device with a color screen, it’s likely to have a major impact on folks’ expectations for tablet-type gadgets: Judging from demos, it’s is blazingly fast. no E-Ink-equipped device is anywhere near zippy, and the Que felt especially sluggish when I tried a pre-release version at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. (The software was still a work in progress at that point, so the version that Plastic Logic releases may be quicker–and the delayed releases makes all the more sense if the company is tweaking it for better performance.)

Unlike most e-reader makers, Plastic Logic is a real technology company with its own innovative manufacturing process and factory. It’s also got a unique focus–it’s catering to business professionals–and the slickest user interface I’ve seen on any E-Ink device to date. It’ll be interesting to see how Que fares–even if we have to wait a bit longer to find out.

As Plastic Logic has said all along, the Que is based on its proprietary plastic transistor technology (which allows for a large, lightweight, glass-free display), has a screen the size of an 8.5″-by-11″ piece of paper, uses a touchscreen interface, and is aimed at businessfolk who “need to read” rather than those who read for pleasure. It’s signed content deals with business-oriented media brands such as the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Fast Company (and my old employer IDG), it lets you drag and drop Microsoft Office documents and other business files from your PC to the e-reader, and it has extensive tools for annotating and organizing documents. It also lets you view your Exchange calendar and has a complementary BlackBerry app which lets you transfer files to the Que.

We learned three striking new things about the gadget today:

1) It has a much richer interface than current e-readers, with a home screen that shows your favorite files, your calendar, and other information, drop-down menus, and drag-and-drop features. It feels a little bit less like an electronic book, and a little more like a computing device that happens to be focused around reading.

(Still to be determined: How much the inherent sluggishness of E-Ink hobbles the interface. Judging from the demo, when you drag and drop a note on-screen, the Que doesn’t even try to show it in motion between the two spots–you drag your finger, and the note transports to the new location as if sent by Wonkavision.)

2) It takes advantage of its large, high-resolution screen to provide something it calles Que TruVue–slick formatting of publications that looks like a big improvement on the drab, text-only presentation on the Kindle and Nook. (We saw USA Today, which preserved a USA Today-like personality, much as its Web site does.

3) The Que is going to be expensive. A lower-end model has 4GB of storage for documents, Wi-Fi, USB, and Bluetooth, but no 3G connectivity; it’s $649. The top-of-the-line one doubles the storage and adds AT 3G wireless; it’s $799. That latter price is more than three times the price of the Kindle and Nook, and much more than Amazon’s $489 large-screen Kindle DX, the closest thing the Que has to a direct competitor that’s actually shipping. It’s also as much as a lot of businesspeople pay for a laptop these days.

Plastic Logic is presumably anticipating that its target market of professionals will find Que compelling enough to pay far more for the device than anyone’s charged for a more consumery e-reader to date. It’ll be fascinating to see if its customer base thinks this device is worth that kind of dough,

Que looks like it has the potential to be the slickest and most versatile e-reading device to date, it’s full of interesting technology and touches, and its emphasis on corporate use is smart; it’s anything but a Kindle wannabe. The demo this morning devoted a lot of time to explaining why it’s better than a folder full of printouts and a stack of business books, magazines, and newspapers. I think it’s pretty self-evident that it can win that comparison, but Plastic Logic didn’t devote much time to another question: Why is the Que better than another device that 100% of its target market owns, uses, and carries–a laptop computer? I have a one-on-one briefing with a representative of the company later this week, and I plan to ask  him or her exactly that.

The Que is shipping in April, and will be available in Barnes & Noble stores and at BN.com as well as from Plastic Logic. (Barnes & Noble is powering the device’s e-book store.) The Que online store is now open for business.

Chipmaker Marvell announced a new processor today, the Armada 166e, that’s designed to let designers of e-readers build better E-Ink-equipped devices. Marvell’s system-on-a-chip builds an E-Ink graphics controller right into the processor, allowing for e-readers that cost less to make but yet which can refresh their E-Ink displays more quickly. (Earlier e-readers have used separate graphics controllers to drive their E-Ink screens.)

Marvell gave me a preview of the technology at work last week. It showed me screens that eliminate the annoying flashing effect when the screen refreshes–the one a Technologizer reader recently asked about–and which are snappy enough to do simple animation. The company says that Armada-powered e-readers will be zippy enough to do fancier, more faithful formatting of e-books, digital magazines, and other content. And it also says that as the E-Ink technology gets better, its chips will really be able to show off their stuff.

The Armada is in multiple upcoming e-readers, including Plastic Logic’s Que, Spring Design’s Alex, and one I hadn’t heard about yet, the double-screen EnTourage eDGe, which claims to be both an e-reader and a netbook and looks a little like Microsoft’s Courier concept:

Marvell also showed me a mockup of a proposed petite e-reader design that looks like it could be kinda cool:

I’m still looking forward to the first color-screen e-readers–even if they’re called tablets rather than e-readers and have battery life that’s a fraction of what E-Ink can deliver. But it’ll be interesting to see how rapidly E-Ink devices improve–and judging from the technology demos Marvell showed me, its new chip will help.

I was startled by the news at first blush, but upon reflection, it makes sense. The QUE has a larger display than the Nook, giving B&N a counterpart to Amazon’s jumbo-screened Kindle DX to sell. It calls itself a PROreader and is aimed at business types. And while  we don’t know all of the QUE’s specs, it has enough in common with the Nook–AT&T 3G wireless, Wi-Fi, a touchscreen, and access to all the content in B&N’s online bookstore–that they’ll make sense as a set.

For all of the Kindle’s apparent success–I say “apparent” because Amazon doesn’t release specific sales figures–most of the book lovers in America still haven’t seen an e-reader in person, let alone bought one. (Borders sells Sony’s Reader, but it does so at a lonely little kiosk that I rarely see anyone paying attention to.) We still don’t know how long a future e-readers have, but if Barnes & Noble pours its heart into selling them, it’ll be as significant a moment in the gadget’s history as Amazon’s introduction of the Kindle a couple of years ago.

It’s also telling us what the name is for the first time–Que–and has revealed a couple of sexy photos which steer clear of revealing the full monty. (The device has been seen repeatedly in all its full-frontali glory in public, but I’m assuming the final industrial design has been kept under wraps.)

Plastic Logic says it’ll say how much Que costs and when it’ll be available at CES; the company obviously doesn’t have any issues with discussing a product long before it’s available, so it’s not a given that next January’s unveiling is proof positive that the device will go on sale in early 2010.

When Plastic Logic started touting its e-reader, its only real competition were the original Amazon.com Kindle and the Sony Reader. The industry’s undergone radical change since then, with the release of the Kindle 2 (recently further revised) and Kindle DX and multiple new Sonys, Best Buy’s rollout of the iRex, and the apparent imminent announcement of a contender from Barnes and Noble. By the time it shows up, it may even be compared to an Apple tablet.

The Plastic Logic device seems to have evolved in response to all this competition even before it ever shipped–for instance, it’ll have 3G connectivity via AT&T, a feature which the company didn’t mention at first. But the Que’s original signature feature was its 8.5″-by-11″ screen and PDF support, and Amazon has already matched those features with the DX. Amazon’s U.S. and International Wireless version of the Kindle 2, like the Que, uses AT&T. And it looks like the Que will find itself competing with the company that’s powering its bookstore: Barnes & Noble.

One thing that hasn’t changed about Plastic Logic’s device is its emphasis on business user. It’s coined the term “proReader” to describe the Que, says it’ll support PDF, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, and promises unspecified “powerful tools for interactive with and managing the content.” It sounds like a logical way to differentiate the product in what will be a rather noisy market, mostly populated by products from companies larger than Plastic Logic. But I’ll still be glad when it’s finally possible to judge the Que in the only way that’s truly satisfying: In our own hands, with our own eyes.

When Plastic Logic first appeared in September, it was strikingly different than Amazon’s Kindle: larger and more corporate, with built-in tools for reading office documents. Then Amazon announced its Kindle DX earlier this month–a Kindle variant that’s larger and which includes PDF support, at least. It’ll also ship months before the Plastic Reader, which is at least seven months away (the company says it’ll show up in 2010). .

The Plastic Logic folks assured D’s Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher that their e-reader is different and better than Kindle’s DX–as well they would, and as it may well be. But I think you can only demo an unreleased product so often, over a certain length of time, before it stops feeling fresh and exciting and runs the risk of being perceived as vaporware. I’ll bet you we’ll hear more news about Plastic Logic as it signs up publishers to distribute their wares on its platform. But if the next major demo of the gizmo didn’t come until it was ready to ship, I wouldn’t object at all…