If you ever noticed the ads on TV or radio, you get to see what companies are pushing. Cell phone companies have often pushed contract plans with tantalizing phones that show pizazz. Smart phones are all the rage and it was brought to my attention a question. With all the things that Smart Phones do, do they still work as cell phones? Images of banging the phone on a counter while trying to make a call comes to mind Yeah, technically its a silly question but socially its not. Cell phones are the latest technology to get techno-junk attached to them. There has been others on the past.
Watches! Who wears a watch? Just us older people who still have the habit of looking at their wrist for the time whether we have a watch on or not. To make us look a little smarter when that happens we invented a joke by saying, "Oh its a hair past a freckle." Watches were all the rave back in the day. After they figured out how to make watches with Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD) they started to add things. I think of it as a kind of play time for those scientists and technicians who made these devised. I saw a radio watch so you don't have to carry a bulky transistor radio, have it on your watch. It had an earphone, so you would have a chord from your wrist to your ear, and that way you have the extra fun of getting tangled up in things. I saw a TV watch. Sounds fun, and you can watch TV anywhere. Watch TV on the beach, driving, walking, running, and so on until you get burnt, crash your car, walk into a telephone pole, or run over somebody. In all about 5 minutes of fun. There were watches with games that required two hands. Yes, more often than not the owners would take them off to play the game after failing at trying to play with one hand and not only that but the watch attached to the other hand. A frustrating two minutes I assure you (not that I tried it.....oh...of course I have). Then someone had the concept of putting a calculator on to a watch. The calculator watch was all the rave when it first came out. It was practical, you could calculate with one hand while wearing it. The display was smallish and it looked like you had a box on your wrist. Later years it proved to be a symbol of old geekdom. Then worse was the databank watch. It had a flat keyboard that was hard to hit with your fingers. Typos were common. Then one find day after you put in your whole address book into the watch and flung the address book out of the window, the watch battery died and you lost all your contacts. Indeed what a fine day that was. I never felt so much anger for so long a time. Then there was the ultimate sarcasm in gadgets, the analog clock on a digital display. Yes, taking the one's and zero's and forcing them to comply with an analog hands on a clock face. They didn't have numbers on them, so you had to guess at the time but it looked good. It had a retro type of look in a digital watch. Then the colorful basic watches came out and that killed the gadgetry of the digital watch. For true to form the main purpose of the watch rose up and slayed the gadget dragon. That purpose was not to tell time, oh no, but to look good. Fashion is the true purpose of the watch. Today a watch just makes you look old. The young do not wear watches anymore.
Calculators! Believe it or not the calculator was gadgetized. When portable calculators first came out, they had batteries in them, and could do simple math. I say portable because there was in existence already the plug into the wall type for business people. These also had small printers on them and resembles a small cash register. These portable calculators had lighted numbers, and you could get the numbers in green or red depending on....I honestly have no clue what it depended on, but you could get them as such. Then came the LCD and it changed everything. The first thing that came out using the LCD was a credit card size calculator. It was flat (thicker than what we would call flat today, but flat by then standards nevertheless). It had a solar panel, so it would never loose power. You couldn't use it in the dark like the old battery powered lighted numbers, though. It was flat. It was metallic. It represented sophistication of a person with money. So naturally people without money bought them to look like people with money. It was flat. OK, that was the major selling point to the public. Flat meant sleek, sexy, ....etc. In other words, they sexed up the practical device we know as a calculator. I had a radio clock calculator. A devise that you could put in your pocket, the size of a smart phone today. You could listen to the radio with speaker or earphone, you could calculate with it, you could tell time, you could even calculate time and dates with it. What you couldn't do is find all the batteries it required, of which it required two weird types.
Now we have smartphones with sleek big screens and lots of apps. You can tell time, calculate, take notes, browse the internet, send emails, grease your social network ....etc....etc....etc. Rumor has it you can make calls with them as well, but by now that almost seems old school. With some smartphones you can make video phone calls, now that's a blast to the past. I seem to remember some black and white footage of a video phone built into a wall. The sixties hairdo-ed lady held a phone handle to her ear watching her contact on a video screen on the wall. Well, now you can do it on the smartphone and in color. Yes, I would use that device to call my mother while she's in curlers. Next they will probably come out in Hi Def so I can really get a the detail on her curlers. To top off the useless gadget on a smartphone, I saw an app that was a watch. Yep, the picture of a watch on the screen on your smartphone with clock face, straps and all. That means you can have a watch that doesn't go on your wrist. Looks like I would have to kick the habit of looking at my wrist for the time.
Gadgets, gadgets how ridiculous some are, but we love them. We love them so much we spend about a hundred billion dollars (in the US alone) a year buying them up. Imagine what we could do with that money if it was spent more wisely. We could make this world a better place instead of amusing ourselves with bizarre and funny gadgets.
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