A technological product awards ceremony was held in Beijing on Dec 6 by Zhongguancun Online, a leading IT information and business portal in China. More than 150 high-tech products invented in 2016 were awarded at the ceremony. Interestingly, three kinds of much-criticized products were also awarded with "Golden Raspberry Awards".

The Golden Raspberry Award is a prize for those products or people that are not popular or even criticized by the media. This award is intended to remind people of products with problems, warning entrepreneurs to create products that can meet consumers' needs and improve the entire innovative and entrepreneurial environment in China.

The three Golden Raspberry Award "winners" were "Intelligent home appliance", Cellphone VR box, and a car air cleaner.

Intelligent home appliance

The word "intelligent" has been particularly popular in the year of 2016 and the research on artificial intelligence may soon change people's lives. However, a product with simply access to WIFI is too far away from the real meaning of "intelligent". The intelligent home appliance is one of them.

Intelligent home appliances should be able to predict users needs and automatically finish relative operations instead of just being on WIFI control. [Photo/Zhongguancun Online]

Take a washing machine as an example. An intelligent washing machine can be started using a mobile phone but users have to put clothes and laundry detergent into it. Users have nearly finished all the preparatory work to do the wash, why not just press the button on the machine by themselves? Not to mention that many appliances already have remote controls.

Real intelligent products should be able to predict the needs of users and automatically and efficiently finish relative operations, which is obviously not available only by providing WIFI access or a mobile phone app.

Mobile phone VR box

"VR" has been a hot topic all throughout 2016 and several products are released in the market. However, even the newest VR products still cannot reach an ideal goal. The mobile phone VR box can only help consumers learn about virtual reality instead of being part of a mature VR ecosystem.

A mobile phone VR box has little practical use but can only popularize basic VR functions for users, in some ways slowing down the development of VR technology. [Photo/Zhongguancun Online]

Car air cleaner

Smog does harm to the human body and air cleaners can partly lower the content of toxic substances in the air. However, the size of a car air cleaner is small because of the limited interior space, which means that the little air cleaner cannot reach at high enough standard.

The best solution to clean the inside air in cars is to improve the air conditioning system instead of creating products that are not up to the task.

The excellent and criticized products are first selected by professional judges at Zhongguancun Online. Then netizens and users started to vote for products they think are useful or useless.

Small-sized car air cleaners cannot adequately reduce smog inside most cars. [Photo/Zhongguancun Online]