Hasta La Gadget!

This week’s dumbest gadget award goes to the TV Hat, a baseball cap with an elongated peak from which hangs a “personal private theater”. It is a head-mounted blackout tent into which you drop your portable media player, wherein you can watch movies in the glare of the midday sun, or in bed next to your smiling spouse. It costs $30, and includes a 2.5x magnification screen.

Who would use this? First, you look like an idiot, or at the very best like some weird, creepy guy in night-vision goggles. Second, this is most likely to be used outside or in a public place, which means you will be rendered not only blind and deaf to the outside world, you will not be paying any attention to the goings-on around you. That would make me very nervous.

But wait, there is another use. The head-mounted dork-theater is not only for watching distraction-free. It is also for keeping others out: “Privacy side shields prevent others from seeing what you are viewing.” Be careful, though. They might not be able to peek at the naughty movie you are watching, but they can sure as hell still see what your hands are doing.

TV Hat [Things You Never Knew Existed via Book of Joe]

It’s a concept design, but as most of Tokyo Flash’s production watches are even wilder, this e-ink timepiece will probably make it almost intact into stores and onto wrists. The stainless steel bracelet covers a panel of the same e-ink “paper” found in the Kindle and other e-readers, with cut-outs to reveal several odd-shaped sections. The paper of course offers the same low-power consumption and high-readability of any e-ink display.

The watch will have a Bluetooth radio to communicate with your cellphone. It will vibrate to give “message, mail and call notifications” and these notifications will also be cryptically encoded into unreadable runes at the top of the display.

There’s no price, no launch date, and not even a picture of a prototype outside of these CAD mockups. We have a feeling that an e-ink watch would look awesome, though, and it looks like Tokyo Flash is breaking with long tradition and actually showing the time in normal numbers. Unbelievable.

E-Clock [Tokyo Flash blog via the Giz]

The only way to be truly prepared for every alcoholic emergency is to always carry a bottle opener with you, but this is, of course, impractical and easy to forget. So what about building an opener into something that you do always carry with you? That’s exactly what the Happy Hour Watch is for.

The quartz timepiece has a bottle opener in the buckle, keeping spraying beer away from the watch itself, which is fashioned from alloy with a stainless-steel back. The watch has two faces, one LCD and the other with traditional hands, and only marked with one hour (beer O’clock).

This only takes care of beer bottles (and if you have two bottles of beer, you have a beer opener anyway), so it’s more suited to tailgating than to romantic picnics. On the other hand, you should be buying screw-top wine anyway: no cork-taint and no corkscrew required. The Happy Hour Watch is $50.

Happy Hour Watch [Happy Hour Timepieces via Uncrate]

This monstrosity is the Casio G-Shock MAN BOX, and it is the ugliest watch you will see. Ever.

The plastic timepiece, possibly conceived after a Casio designer accidentally drank a box of crayons and then vomited, is shock resistant, waterproof to 20 meters (65-feet) and anti-magnetic (?). That line-up of ruggedized features means that when you inevitably try to smash this thing to tiny, single-colored pieces, you will fail. In fact, if someone buys this for you as a gift, the two year battery life dictates the minimum period you will have to wear the MAN BOX before being able to legitimately toss it away.

There are other functions built-in, too, from the time (apparently), some alarms and a stopwatch. These will remain unused, however, as the face is so frickin’ cluttered that it is impossible to make out anything other than the eye-searing colors.

Amusingly, Casio seems equally embarrassed by the design. When I tried to drag the product shot to my desktop for this post, I found that it had been covered up by a transparent 1×1 pixel gif. Oh, and that MAN BOX name? It’s not what you think: There is actually a little plastic, identically-colored man in the box with the watch. The insults continue with the price, which is an equally eye-popping ¥19,000, or $210.

Finally, the inevitable, and tortuous, pun, trading on the product description (”embody the fusion of art and technology”), the name (”MAN BOX”) and the hideous splashing colors. To sum up, “art”, “MAN BOX”, colors: It really is a load of old Pollocks.

G-SHOCK MAN BOX [Casio via Akihabara News]

At first glance, Lace-amatic seems like a terrible idea, bringing needless complexity to something that is so simple we do it without thinking: tying your shoelaces. Consider it for a little longer, and Lace-amatic still seems bad, although the name is retro-fantastic.

The informercial-ready device consists of two sections. One is a peg with a slot and a handle. You slide the loosely-tied laces into the slot, and then slide the second section of the device – a flat plate – behind the laces. This plate holds the peg in place. When you want to tighten the shoe, just flip the lever. The peg turns and twists the laces with it. Once installed, you can flip the lever open and closed with your feet, so you don’t even have to bend down.

Buy one of these and you have just wasted $10. You might have more fun just burning the money. Seriously, it takes seconds to knot your laces. And before you all leave comments about people with stiff old bones who have trouble bending down, I’ll just say this: slip-on shoes. There’s no need to embarrass yourselves by adding a pointless plastic widget to your sneakers. Unless, of course, it matches your cellphone-holster and elastic-waisted jeans. In that case, go ahead. And can I interest you in a never-used fanny-pack?

Lace-amatic [Lace-amatic via Oh Gizmo!]