Hasta La Gadget!

Kevin Smith stood me up.

I was scheduled to interview him one-on-one, but he skipped out on our date so he could go ogle the booth babes and tchotchkes at the Belkin booth here at Macworld Expo, apparently. Snootchie bootchies to you, too, jerk. (Sob.)

So I had to sit in the audience with all the other sweaty Mac nerds and listen to him tell us how the iPad might change the future of movies.

“Will it change filmmaking?” Smith said during his question-and-answer session at Macworld Expo 2010 on Thursday. “I’m sure it’ll be used to kill somebody in a movie at one point. Some guy’s got an iPad sticking out of his head. And Steve Jobs is like, that’s not what I wanted.”

At least he put on a good show. Hailed by many as the man who made comic-book-loving Star Wars geeks cool, Smith sprinkled words of wisdom in between smatterings of F-bombs and references to his genitalia in response to questions posed by audience members.

Smith was the only celebrity to appear at Macworld Expo now that Apple — led by that guy who wears turtlenecks and granddaddy jeans — has permanently backed out of the 25-year-old trade show.

The writer and independent director, well known for his films Dogma, Chasing Amy and Mallrats, shared his thoughts on Avatar, the drama between Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno, and the future of independent filmmaking in a troubled economy.

“I enjoyed it for what it was,” Smith said of James Cameron’s Avatar. “I’m totally with the big blue fucking cats. Especially the one cat that was sexy and I wanted to fuck her.”

As for the Tonight Show, Smith snarkily replied that nobody watches either of the hosts’ shows anyway, as shown by their ratings. He admitted he never watches TV, because, he said, “I smoke a lot of weed so I fall asleep at like 8 o’clock at night.”

Filmmaking students in the audience asked Smith what they should do to succeed as film creators after college.

“I’d make one,” he said. “Make one that everybody likes. What do you think happened? Think I was standing over a virgin holding a necronomicon? The trick is to make something everybody digs.”

However, Smith, whose mainstream movie Cop Out, starring Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan, is due in theaters Feb. 26, acknowledged that the independent cinema scene has fallen on hard times. He mourned over Disney’s recent shutdown of art-house production company Miramax Films.

“I was very sad when Miramax shuttered,” he said. “It shows you the state of the business right now. Hate to throw that out to the independent filmmakers, but the market is fucked.”

Updated 9 p.m. PDT: Smith and I have clarified over Twitter that he did not stand me up; our inability to connect was likely a failure between public relations flacks.

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

If you’re a musician, walking the floor of the NAMM Show is like taking a trip to Candy Mountain.

All the latest music gear gets trotted out at the massive industry expo in Anaheim, California. We’re talking five or six football fields worth of the newest guitars, amps, basses, drums, mikes, keyboards, sousaphones, electric oboes — think Guitar Center cranked up to 11. It’s pretty intense.

What follows is a list of the coolest, most creative stuff we saw at this year’s NAMM Show in January. These aren’t in-depth reviews, but we did get to play with, touch and listen to scores of different products, including everything shown here. If we were cut from lesser moral cloth, these are the things we would have smuggled out under our overcoats.

(Oh, the NAMM name? The show is put on by the National Association of Music Merchants.)

Above:

Minarik Lotus Double-Neck

Guitar maker M.E. Minarik is known for his wild designs, but this gorgeously lysergic double-neck version of his classic Lotus takes the space cake. The looks are outrageous: The mother-of-pearl binding, fretboard inlays and the intricately carved figures of Hindu gods and goddesses had us wishing we’d brought the bell bottoms and the incense.

The Lotus is all mahogany under the quilted maple top, so the gold Tone Perfect pickups give off a nice, warm, Gibson-style sound. Standard, Chinese-built Minarik Lotus models start at around $500. This fitted out, fully custom, U.S.-built double-neck version runs upwards of $3,500.

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

When I picked up my iPhone over the weekend, I had an epiphany. I was using the LinkedIn app to confirm an invitation to connect, and it hit me: This is the future of mobile computing, the mobile web — the mobile experience.

No, I’m not saying the LinkedIn app is the future per se (that’d be silly), but rather the overall concept of it. The LinkedIn iPhone app is, in my opinion, better than the actual LinkedIn.com website. Same goes for the Facebook app compared to Facebook.com.

Gone are their busy, tab-infested UIs. In their stead are beautiful bubbly icons screaming “Touch me!” We no longer have to squint or click around in search of the feature we’re trying to access: The button is right there in that simple interface for us to tap.

The Facebook and Linkedin apps are two key examples of popular services whose iPhone apps outdid the websites they were trying to “port.” They’re two gems glistening brightly for the future of mobile.

Now that we can have experiences like these on a bigger touchscreen, with the iPad and the horde of tablets that will follow it, we can expect computing to become much easier than what we’re accustomed to today.

That’s not to say everything will have to be an iPad app. iPad owners aren’t going to be the only ones to benefit from Apple’s invention.

The iPad opens a path for an improved web experience for everyone. As soon as the iPad and its competing slates are in people’s hands, we’ll see a host of websites tailoring their content for touchscreen tablet browsing, and it’s going to be far more pleasant than the web experience we’re used to today.

Have you seen Flickr’s mobile website lately? Or YouTube’s? They’re both far friendlier, simpler and to-the-point than their original websites, and they’re plenty functional.

I’m awfully jaded about monotonous browser tabs, puny headlines and boring boxes all over the place, aren’t you? The iPhone and the iPad give web developers an excuse to break free from traditional user interfaces.

As a side effect it’s also pushing developers to ditch old, outdated web standards, such as Adobe Flash, and embrace newer ones like HTML5. Thank goodness, because we’ve been needing a change.

Cleaner, friendlier, intimate UI may sound like a step backward, but it’s not. There are huge implications.

We all learn how to touch with our fingers before we figure out how to type or click a mouse. Often when we think about computing we overlook children and the elderly, and the iPad is going to be the first computer to eliminate the social divide.

The iPhone was the first phone that a Luddite could figure out in seconds and a hacker could tinker around with for endless hours. In an analogous way the iPad is going to be the computer a toddler can play games with and learn, and the same computer your grandma uses to send e-mails, browse the web and edit photos.

If you think about how a computer like this will impact people sociologically, suddenly the iPad is far more than a larger iPod Touch, as many have described it. It’s the computer for everyone: an idea Apple has been working toward for years.

That doesn’t mean the iPad will be the only computer for everyone and destroy every PC on the market, because that’s not even remotely likely. But it will introduce a significant new category.

For anyone plugged in to tech history, the idea of the child-friendly, super-lightweight computer is actually reminiscent of Xerox pioneer Alan Kay’s 40-year-old concept of the Dynabook (pictured in sketch above). I’ve been chatting with Kay about the iPad, but he’s waiting to provide his official comment on the device until he’s had a chance to try it out.

Tablet naysayers have anticipated Apple’s tablet would be a failure because of form factor, ergonomics and UI. But they missed out on the bigger problem: Nobody has cared to create content (be it web or native applications) for tablets — until now.

Say what you will about Apple, but Steve Jobs’ company is a market shaper, and the iPad is the only tablet that could shove the computing world in a new direction.

Apple has shipped over 75 million iPhones, and the iPhone OS continues to dominate mobile web traffic. Meanwhile, the App Store has served 3 billion downloads and claimed 99.4 percent of the mobile-software market.

Content developers need to see these kinds of numbers to have faith in investing in a new platform.  At this rate, we’re all heading with Apple into the future of computing, and it’s looking quite bright.

See Also:

• Why 2010 Will Be the Year of the Tablet
• Hands-On With the Apple iPad
• Apple's iPad Tablet: Full Coverage
• Apple Change Quietly Makes iPhone, iPad Into Web Phones
• IPad Books Are US-Only
• Apple iPad Raises the Stakes for E-Readers
• Apple iPad's Display Is More Like a TV Than a Laptop
• Ten Things Missing From the iPad

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Are Sony products ticking “fail” bombs just waiting to go off? Many consumers in Japan still subscribe to the belief that the tech titan purposely designed its devices to break immediately after their warranty expires, according to a report.

The Telegraph reports on the “timer” myth that has plagued Sony for 20 years. It started out as an urban legend that the tech-obsessed Japanese had joked about in manga and vented about in online forums. But in 2006, the recall of more than 4.1 million Dell laptops containing faulty Sony batteries drove the rumor into social consciousness as a serious theory. (If you include laptops made by Sony, Toshiba, Lenovo, Fujitsu and Apple in addition to Dell, the grand total was actually 9.6 million laptop batteries worldwide, according to a previous Wired report.)

Explosive batteries greatly damaged Sony’s reputation. The company has been working to dispel the timer myth for years, but every incident of product failure post-warranty perpetuates the legend. Sony’s PlayStation 3 still remains highly popular because it is allegedly exempt from the timers’ curse, according to the Telegraph. (My PS3 hard drive died 3 months post-warranty, mind you, but that was probably due to my two-month-long obsession with playing Borderlands.)

“For a nation proud of their technological innovations, burning laptops and the biggest product recall in history were not exactly easy to deal with,” the Telegraph wrote. It’s a fascinating story by the Telegraph definitely worth a read.

See Also:

• Sony Flaunts 3-D TVs, Taylor Swift to Regain Its Cool
• Laptop Fires Prompt Sony Battery Recall — Again
• Sony in Bad Need of Recharging

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Believe it or not, this electronic guitar is actually a Gentoo Linux box, running a 500MHz AMD Geode processor, an 8.4-inch, 800×600 LCD touch screen with an SSH server and a MIDI output. It is made of milled, solid plastic, and could probably be hooked up to Rock Band. But that is to rob it of the romance. Listen:

Yes, it rocks. The instrument, called Misa, is really a guitar-shaped computer, a midi controller whose “frets” are in fact 144 keycaps. The screen control works in four directions, allowing control of two sound parameters simultaneously. These can really be anything you can program into a MIDI device, but in the video the y-xis is set to control note velocity and the x-axis controls distortion in the form of a “digitaliser filter”.

The Misa has been designed, and will be sold by Michael, a software engineer. He made it because current guitar MIDI controllers still use strings, which are limited in what they can do to control the sound. To be clear, and to stave off the inevitable luddite comments, the Misa is not intended to replace, or even improve on, the guitar. It is a new instrument entirely, which happens to borrow the guitar’s interface. In this it is clearly better than the hideous keyboard “guitars” that haunted the 1980s.

Michael plans to set a price within the next day or two. If we may suggest one thing, it would be a change of name. “Misa” sounds much too much like something the loathsome Jar Jar Binks would say.

Misa Digital Guitar [Misa Digital via The Raw Feed]

See Also:

• Finally, Guitar Hero for Actual Guitar
• Maverick Guitar Builder Makes Music Out of Steel and Weather …
• Headstock Guitar Tuner Picks Up Vibes