1870 – 2020retired
50/50 (soft drink)
“Half grapefruit, half lime, all Midwest — gone in one piece after a century and a half.”
“It beamed your life phone-to-phone with a tap, and died as quietly as it faded.”
Android Beam arrived in 2011 with Ice Cream Sandwich, letting you share bookmarks, contacts, directions, and YouTube videos with a simple tap of two NFC-enabled phones. It felt like magic: bump your phones together and your stuff crossed over. After Google acquired Bump, the feature got even better.
But the magic never quite worked as well as promised. By 2017, ComputerWorld listed Beam among once-trumpeted features that quietly faded away, noting that other sharing systems proved simpler and more reliable. Deprecated in Android 10 in January 2019 and fully removed in Android 14, Beam lives on only in memory — and in Nearby Share, its AirDrop-chasing successor.
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“Half grapefruit, half lime, all Midwest — gone in one piece after a century and a half.”
“A pie with ambition: even McDonald's couldn't keep New Zealand from loving it.”
“Squeezed fresh, laid to rest in a boardroom.”