Clouds have been gathering on the UWB horizon for some time. The Bluetooth SIG turned to IEEE 802.11 as the basis of its Bluetooth 3.0 standard, coming in April. Texas Instruments pulled out of WiMedia last year, and Intel has stopped developing its own UWB silicon. Also last year, Sony introduced another short-range, low-power technology called TransferJet, which has been adopted by several consumer electronics companies.

Technology is not the problem with UWB, which is much faster than Wi-Fi and consumes much less power, In-Stat's O'Rourke said. But while high-bandwidth uses such as grabbing a TV show off a digital video recorder for viewing on the road are interesting, they won't sell many products, O'Rourke said.

"A lot of their scenarios are really future-based. They're not in the here and now," he said.

Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney was more blunt.

"Great that WiMedia Alliance has given up," Dulaney wrote in an e-mail interview. "They could have tried again and again to make this work, taking a lot of unsuspecting users' money in the process. I wish more vendors would call it quits when appropriate."