The top comment on Gadget Lab last week was posted by senor_demasiado, on my post about the Zune HD.
“What’s with the smug comments about microsoft?” senor_demasiado asks. That’s a response to my question about what kinds of video you’d want to store on your Zune, then display on your hotel room’s widescreen TV. What kind of video, you ask? Think of the children, he says: Such videos are indispensible for entertaining the wee ones on long trips.
And then there’s always the “tech for tech’s sake” argument:
“Why would you want to plug your Zune into a TV?… I bet 10 years ago, people would ask, “why would someone want to put a video camera on a phone”? The answer is always the same for these questions; Because it doesn’t have one now, or just Because.
Good point, senor_demasiado. Why ask why? New features, in all their purity, are the Gadget Lab’s reason for being. Useful, useless, or just plain awesome, we love writing about them, especially if we can also use them to entertain our kids. So you want to put HDMI out capabilities on a media player? Hell yeah! We’ll find a use for it, somehow.
The comment-of-the-week prize is a Leatherman Freestyle CX (above), one of the smallest tools Leatherman makes. It’s got a pair of pliers and a hard, 154CM stainless steel blade, and that’s about it. It fits nicely in your pocket, feels good in your hand and looks cool. Thanks very much to the Leatherman company for donating these as prizes.
A close runner-up last week was Rob Beschizza’s comment comparing fanny packs to Atlantis: “The problem with fanny packs is the same as the problem with Atlantis: as soon as you make the proposition reasonable, it becomes something else entirely.” Unfortunately, Rob, as the former editor of Gadget Lab and the gadgets editor for BoingBoing — aka “Wired’s paramilitary wing” — has been disqualified from winning. Instead, I am going to send him a consolation prize: the iPhone case I got at the GDGT party last week.
There is one more week to win a prize, so keep those comments coming. And as a reminder, here’s the Gadget Lab comment policy.
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