Our perennial chart-topper, Duke Nukem Forever — two-time winner of our lifetime achievement award and Vaporware’s official mascot — is actually ineligible this year for legit reasons. After Duke developer 3DRealms collapsed into a financial black hole in 2009, the project was handed over to Gearbox Software. Now, after 12 long years, Gearbox has tagged DNF with a 2011 release date. Seriously, it’s almost done. Thousands of PAX 2010 attendees got to play a working version. For real. Don’t worry though, we’re saving a slot for Sir Duke on next year’s list just in case.

The tech world is still filled with plenty of vape fodder, though. Chrome OS laptops. The mythical white iPhone 4. We snuffed wisps of stale vapor from all the major categories in 2010: iPad apps, set-top boxes, console games, web apps, mobile phones, planes, trains, and EVs.

Got a primo candidate you want to nominate for Vaporware 2010?

The Rules:

• It must have been promised to ship during 2010.
• No rumors. That means no Facebook phones, solar-powered bathyspheres or Radio Raheem iPod boomboxes. It has to have been announced with a 2010 release date attached.
• If you can buy it, play it, download it or open it in your browser, it doesn’t count. If it shipped — even if it sucked — it’s not vaporware.
• Software stuck in a never-ending, pre-release, beta-testing stage can be considered vaporware.
• Likewise hardware prototypes. It may exist in some company’s lab and trotted out at developer events or trade shows. But it’s vaporware until it hits store shelves where consumers can purchase it.

To submit a nomination, do one of the following:

• Add it to the widget below. We’ll leave the submission widget open for a week.
• E-mail it to us. Send your nomination to Cette adresse email est protégée contre les robots des spammeurs, vous devez activer Javascript pour la voir. . To make it easier on us, please put the name of the company and product in the subject line.
• Leave a comment on this blog post.

In all cases, don’t forget to include a couple of acerbic comments we can quote. Links are a big help, too.

After submitting, go ahead and vote up your favorites that have already been added to the list below. And no, the widget doesn’t turn your submission into vaporware — we’re monitoring the tool, so we’re killing dupes, spam and dehumanizing comments.

We’ll round up the submissions and announce the 2010 Vaporware award winners around the dawn of the new year.

Upvote up your favorite Vaporware nominees or submit your own

Nominate some suckage

Submit your nominees here. We’re moderating the submissions, so you won’t see yours appear until it’s approved. Don’t panic if you don’t see anything happen right away when you click the submit button — we’re on it. While you can submit as many nominees as you want, you can only submit one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.

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Authors: Michael Calore

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