Lately I’ve been growing frustrated with my old first gen iPhone. It’s slow, it’s buggy, Apple has stopped supporting it, and I’m sick of people sending me SMS messages that I can’t open. I was seriously thinking of going the Android route and getting an Evo, or waiting for the new Windows mobile platform to be released. But then I had a revelation.
Nokia Star Trek Phone
Sorry to say this is only a prototype, so odds are very good that you’ll never be able to call yourself an owner. As you may know, Nokia had some major product placement in last year’s Star Trek movie; when mini-Kirk is taking a vintage Corvette Stringray out for a spin and receives an angry call on the car’s Nokia carphone (I guess carphones make a comeback in a few hundred years).
3D Television is a Fad
I wonder how long it will take for this fad to play itself out. The price difference between a 3D capable TV compared with your standard HDTV is dramatic. For instance, right now you can purchase a Samsung 50′ LCD TV for just under $1000. It even comes with a free Blu-ray player. While the Samsung 50′ 3D TV costs a whopping $1800 (this is actually a relatively cheap 3D TV). And that’s not the end of it. The 3D TV requires the purchase of a 3D Blu-ray player, which will cost around $200. Now you need the glasses, one for each member of the household, and they cost about $150 EACH. So let’s see, you’ve spent $800 more on the television, an additional $200 for a 3D Blu-ray player and at least $300 for a few sets of glasses, grand total; $1400 more for the 3D setup than you would have spent for a regular 2D experience. And if my hunch is right, this entire medium is a passing fad that will never catch on, or even worse, new technology is right around the corner making all of this obsolete.
The Wilderness Downtown
If you want to see what happens when you combine HTML5, the Google API, some Google engineers, and Arcade Fire, then visit thewildernessdowntown.com. It’s an interactive music video by Arcade Fire and Chris Milk set in your childhood neighborhood. Yes, you read it right, YOUR neighborhood. When the page is loaded, you are asked to enter the address of your childhood home, after which it does a little processing. Press play and the video begins. It uses Google Maps and Street View, overlayed with animations in several browser windows to tell a story. OK, it sounds a bit cheesy, but it actually works very well on an artistic level.