It’s roundup and prediction season, when everybody looks back on the past year and looks ahead to the new one. We’re no different of course, with Russell reviewing his predictions from last year, and our new ones to come very soon. I’m going to take a slightly different tack the next couple days, looking at the best and worst in mobile in 2005, starting with the worst. These are the products, services and ideas that went down like the proverbial fart in church this year, in no particular order:

- the Vodafone 702sMO and 702MO handsets: These were two 3G handsets Vodafone put on sale in Japan — about two years two late. When 2-megapixel cameras were common, if not the norm, Vodafone and Motorola start selling this wonder, with its stunning VGA camera, delivering 310,000 pixels of poorly lit, blurry wonder. The 702sMO gets special recognition: in a land where flip phones undoubtedly reign supreme, why the companies thought anybody would buy not just a crappy phone, but a crappy phone in a candybar form factor, is well beyond my mental abilities. Unsurprisingly, the phones flopped and were yanked.

- Let’s stay with Vodafone Japan, for its covers to make handsets look like lumps of cheese. Vodafone Japan’s really in trouble, and as one of its many misguided attempts to right the ship, it released a range of covers for a Toshiba handset that let users disguise them as tires, dinosaur eggs and… cheese. Surprise, surprise, the gimmick didn’t turn the operator around.

- NTP’s push email product that’s being hurt by RIM’s Blackberry system. Oh wait, that’s right, NTP’s never made a product to be hurt by RIM. So they deserve a bajillion dollars.

- Verizon Wireless’ EV-DO offering. Get “Unlimited Broadband Access for $59.99 a month.” * with a qualifying monthly voice plan as well. ** and a 2-year contract. *** and don’t think about doing anything other than web or e-mail. **** and we use a different dictionary than you, where “unlimited” doesn’t mean “not limited in terms of number, quantity or extent”, but rather “you can use as much as we think is okay”.

- Gizmondo. It would be a shame to single out the device alone, when the company’s executives deserve just as much, if not more scorn. High salaries, expensive cars, questionable relationships and ties to the criminal underworld — all in a year’s work in the handheld gaming business.

- Crazy Frog. Enough said.

-And last, but certainly not least, the Motorola ROKR. Since it’s nearly Christmas, I’m feeling slightly generous, so I won’t build on my extensive back catalog explaining how and why the ROKR sucks. Needless to say, it failed to come even close to living up to the ridiculous hype surrounding it. And there’s nobody to blame for that but Motorola. So, deservedly, the ROKR gets my STNKR of the year award.

Now it’s your turn — what were the biggest mobile failures of 2005?