Hasta La Gadget!

We love a good concept design, but there’s a thin line between inventing something useful and veering off into a crazy fantasy-land of what-ifs. This admittedly cool file-transfer tool is firmly in the second category, and clearly the designers took not a second of their time to figure out how it might actually work.

The device is the iDrop, a stylus which you use like a pipette. Touch the end to text, an image or even an app on your tablet’s screen and then press the end of the pen to “suck” the information into the pen. Once stored, it shows up – magically, it would seem – as an icon in a column of other stored snippets, just as if it were liquid.

To paste the file back again, you just reverse the process. The fanciful CAD mockups even show a pool of liquid atop the tablet’s screen, possibly the most ridiculous part of all.

I don’t mean to belittle the idea: Apart from the fact that it uses an old-school stylus, it seems to very useful. But there is no hint as to the effort needed to implement the idea, the programming, the method of transfer, the, well, everything. It reminds me of the “designs” me and my friends used to draw in school when we were little kids: cars that turned into helicopters, plans for underground road systems, and more. I always thought, later, that these were mere childish fantasies. It turns out that they were something more. They were “concept designs”.

iDrop Information, Simple! [Yanko]

See Also:

• Who Wants a Stylus? Apple Is Thinking About It
• Designers Unearth Apple Tablet Prototypes — From 1983
• Gallery: Tablet Computing From 1888 to 2010