Hasta La Gadget!

We wanted to hate Pocket Heat, because it seems like such a terrible, foolish idea for an iPhone application. But we couldn’t, because a) the design and execution, right down to the lovely application icon, is absolutely dead-on and b) it doesn’t actually work any more

Pocket Heat turned the iPhone into a heater. You slid your finger and dial in the amount of heat you needed, and the app would industriously push the CPU and other processes in order to warm things up. If it worked on a regular computer, its fans would spin up and pump out hot air like a hair dryer.

The past-tense review is because the latest version of Pocket Heat doesn’t actually heat anything: it merely lights up the screen with a mellow, warm glow. According to the iTunes Store page, it “has no heating capabilities/battery drain” and instead features “warming graphics and sound effects”.

We imagine that consumer hatred caused this reversal, as draining the battery and overheating a computer is a rather stupid thing to do. But shouldn’t we be able to choose to be stupid? I guess that now the most stupid thing to do is to buy a $2 app that just shows pictures of a heater on screen. Hot? Sadly, not.

Pocket Heat [iTunes via Mashable]