Tech Juxtaposed: What is productive?
The internet, largely powered by targeted ads that may or may not come across as targeted, sometimes provides irony to be captured in the browser window. Featured below, an article in the NYTimes Bits Blog about a decadent $2,000 mobile phone.
Now the story here is that it’s got “130 precision ball bearings” to facilitate the swivelling earpiece and a 62-carat sapphire crystal on the face— oh, sorry. That’s not the story, that’s what’s stupid. For this to be one of the more recent press blips alongside recently announced cutbacks in the middle of worldwide financial instability is surely not productive for one of America’s senior electronics manufacturers.
While it should be understood that consumer electronics is far from Motorola’s only money making widget, their inability to put together any North American appeal doesn’t help their - er - situation.
So I point you to the juxtaposition: to the right of this article about this stupid phone is an advertisement for a piece of iPhone software. More specifically, this is a 3rd-party app that lets you read various pieces of classic literature rendered in stylized, animated on-screen books. For a dollar.
Let me be even more specific: Clicking on that advertisement and buying that 99-cent app (the ad opens iTunes) tosses money to Google for distributing the banner, Apple for maintaining the App Store (and producing the iPhone that you bought to begin with), and finally, the developer working on Classics, who probably takes the majority share of such a transaction.
The Bits post on the Motorola Aura discusses this trivial piece of electronics, is amusing enough to compel me to write this, but ultimately just helps the commissioners of that ad next to the $2,000 phone.
