Word: gadget
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...BRAIN Where does James Bond keep the keys to his Aston Martin? Chances are they're dangling from a remarkable (and at $14, unusually inexpensive) gadget called the Merconnet Magic-I Keychain Databank. About the size and shape of an anchovy, the Magic-I holds 120 names and phone numbers, plus a calendar and an alarm clock (with times for 100 cities worldwide). You don't even need cables to upload data to it--it reads the information straight off your monitor screen. Aston Martin sold separately...
...office this morning after dropping my son off at school, I passed store after store with special Father's Day promotions. I saw pictures of handsome Dads with just a dusting of gray in their closely-cropped hair, holding a small child in one hand and some wonderful gadget in the other. I admit I did feel a frisson of excitement. But this was not sentiment about the enduring role of fathers in our lives, but the pervasive tickle of modern capitalism, where in order to enhance the desire for more and more objects, we have to create more...
Some products respond to consumers' needs; others, like Sony's airboard, seek to create them. Like sending e-mails from the pool, or curling up in bed with your favorite sitcom. This futuristic gadget combines the functions of a television, a dvd player and the Internet into a portable tablet the size of a place mat. If it catches on, it could change the concept of being digital at home...
With the possible exception of the electric nose- and ear-hair clippers, there is no device in my gadget-heavy house more consistently and surprisingly good at its job than the TiVo box. As you really should know by now, TiVo is the personal video recorder (PVR) that learns the kind of shows you like, saves them on its internal hard drive, zips through commercials and pauses live...
...universal remote cannot control a pet rock, much less a satellite dish. First you have to take it around and introduce it to each gadget in turn, punching in the proper code for each make and model, so that the remote knows what signals to send to which device. With some remotes, this phase is sheer torture. The extremely fancy Philips Pronto ($399), for example, forced me to watch 20 minutes of Chains of Love before I could figure out how to change the channel on my TV. No one should have to go through that...