I had a PS/2 CueCat which IIRC required some hardware modification to use unlocked, at least early on. I stuck in it a drawer and never bothered with it again. The default functionality was useless.

The thing I miss however is things like that old Amazon web service that. Icould look up book information for free. For a few years there were some really interesting free XML-RPC and SOAP web services that were relatively easy to plug into and access interesting services. I really miss those services and composability for mash-ups.