Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “This Was Ahead of its Time!”.
I tweeted this recently just thinking about how vine was the home of short form vertical videos before it died in 2016. and now in 2022, tiktok has been the most downloaded app on the planet for, like the last 12 straight months in a row and short form Vertical videos are blowing up and i could reach no other conclusion than vine was ahead of its time. You might look at the electric vehicle revolution, that’s happening right now around us and think wow. We have a lot to thank tesla for, but tesla wasn’t anywhere near the first electric car that would technically be in the 1890s, but even in the 1990s there was an electric car from gm called the ev-1.
It was this little two-door, electric coupe, with a 55-mile range that sold less than 2000 units before being discontinued removed from the road and crushed. Now, of course, years later, evs are on the rise, everyone’s turning their car companies entirely electric from the inside out, but no one remembers the gm ev1 because it was ahead of its time, and so that got me thinking. There have been so many products that have launched over the years that have failed, but just because the world wasn’t ready for them yet, and i have a few favorites that have come to mind, and so these are my top favorite three gadgets that were ahead of Their time so number three google glass, this one’s a classic. I think a lot of people remember google glass, but probably forget some of the crazier details. So first of all, this was back in 2013 nearly a decade ago and they revealed it in the craziest way.
They had skydivers literally jump out of a blimp while streaming an entire skydive live through google hangouts straight from glass, where they eventually landed on top of the building. Google, i o is happening in then. They tore through the insides on bikes to get up to this stage i mean that’s a pretty grand reveal for a pair of smart glasses with a head mounted projection display. That would give you extra contextual information about the world around you.
I do remember this being the first genuinely useful looking pair of ar glasses, though so you could see turn by turn navigation in front of you with google maps. You could ask google assistant questions with your voice and just get it to show your results anywhere you’re at or it could show you your notifications from your phone as they came in that was super nerdy to want to do all of this hands-free all the time By wearing something on your face, but even at 1500 there was a lot of interest from nerds like me, but just general curiosity from the public and google actually made this explorer edition. That was a super limited edition run that would help them test them in real life, but pretty quickly there started to become problems.
I mean, i guess. The first problem was that it looked like this, which you know i mean it’s cool, that you have a camera and you can see like a first person view of photos and videos of things and share them. But this was 2013 and people were absolutely not ready for people wearing a camera and a computer on their face.
It didn’t have any sort of visual indicator on the outside that you were recording or taking photos. So people started getting kicked out of movie theaters while wearing them, because security thought they might be recording the movie and someone also got pulled over in their car and ticketed, because the police thought they might have been watching a movie on google glass. But even if you could get past the whole camera on the face thing like this is what it would look like to talk to somebody using glass. You know the the button up here, the glancing up to the side, the touch pad.
If it wasn’t like obvious already, it was kind of unnatural to be talking to someone while doing that. Eventually, google killed the project for consumers. Glass actually does live on through an enterprise version where it doesn’t have to worry about looking like an everyday pair of glasses, acceptable to wear in public, but you can actually buy google glass enterprise edition 2 right now for your company, where you can do live, video Or give step-by-step instructions on how to assemble things stuff like that. But the point is it got utterly rejected by regular people by the public and we haven’t seen it for years, but it’s 2022 now and it’s very clear that head mounted displays vr and ar are all again right on the horizon and about to explode again. Snapchat has made multiple versions of their spectacles that let you share the world from your first person perspective. That’S a camera on your face facebook partnered with ray bans to make some sunglasses that record video and photos. That’S also a camera on your face and apple. Of course has had a rumored ar or vr headset for what feels like years now, probably coming out in the next year or two and knowing apple designed to be worn and accepted by regular people, and even at i, o this year kind of a callback. Google did a one more thing and it was a pair of ar glasses, but this time focusing on live translation so not quite the same thing as google glass. But still it’s a start.
Google glass walked, so these could run. They were for sure, ahead of their time. Alright, so number two was the samsung galaxy camera. So this is a bit of a lesser known gadget.
Some of you might remember it, but it was one of my favorite things ever so i want to give it its flowers, so this is 2012. This is the same year as the galaxy s3, but this is basically a whole mirrorless camera with a galaxy s3 on the back. So this is a 16 megapixel camera with a 21x optical zoom lens on the back, all the processing power of a galaxy s3 with a quad-core chip, on-board storage, one gig of ram, and it was running the newest version of android, which at the time was android. 4.1, basically, the only thing it was lacking was an actual cellular radio to be able to make phone calls.
If you ask me great product idea, great idea, like obviously most cameras, have pretty bad uis as far as navigating through them, but even if they are pretty good, they don’t have an internet connection and a phone on the back. And so how often are you just trying to take a picture and then do some quick edits in lightroom and then put it on instagram like just that quick workflow right there, all the time? That’S exactly what this was built to do it had a smartphone display. It had great performance, it had the ui for it it was a dream. So why did this fail? Well, you could blame it on social media being a little bit older. You could blame it on maybe a camera market being too small at that time.
People didn’t want a dedicated camera, but at the end of the day the real reason was turned out. The camera wasn’t that good, the actual quality of the photos weren’t that much better or easier to take than a galaxy s3 in the first place. And so that’s the reason.
The reviews were terrible and nobody actually wanted to buy the thing. But in the background it was very clear that a real camera with a full android experience or a full ui on the back made a lot of sense. Like i said, most camera uis currently pretty bad and even if they aren’t, they sure, as hell can’t edit a photo and then post it on twitter or instagram fun fact. Android was actually supposed to be a digital camera os before it got bought up by google and turned into a phone os, so really makes you think, but i think what it comes down to is basically there’s a friction to get something from a camera to instagram. There is taking the photo and then wirelessly transferring it to your phone, maybe which is either going to compress it or it’s going to take a long time and so most people most people would just take a photo with their smartphone. It’S easy it’s good enough, but for photographers for the creator class or people enthusiasts like myself that friction between getting a good shot and putting it online is the problem.
Now there are other cracks at solving this. There were two generations of the galaxy camera before it was cancelled. Last year, zeiss made a camera called the zeiss zx1.
It’S a full-frame camera with a fixed 35 millimeter f2 lens that ran android, and it also had lightroom, mobile and instagram pre-installed, which let you edit right there on the screen and immediately post. But it was also six thousand dollars which is entirely out of reach for most people, and also you couldn’t install any other app besides lightroom and instagram. And then there have been plenty of attempts from companies to make phones that have all the features of a full-time camera.
So panasonic cm1 comes to mind. This is from 2014, and this had a one inch 20 megapixel sensor and a 28mm f 2.8, like a branded lens, definitely looked like a full-blown camera, but the rest of the phone wasn’t good enough to justify people buying this one. We even had sony try add-on lenses for your phone, so here’s another name for you, sony qx10. I actually owned one of these.
I never reviewed it, but it was a separate camera and lens that connects to your phone via bluetooth and pairs via nfc and just latches to the back of your phone, to give you a better camera, but even that was 250 dollars and didn’t work perfectly. Every time you know how bluetooth is, there’s still so much friction and again, at the end of the day, most people totally fine with just the smartphone camera for most stuff they’re putting on instagram. I just did a video on the sony xperia 1 mark iv. If you haven’t checked that out already that one has real optical zoom, so it’s a better physical camera, but again for photographers creators. Enthusiasts people like myself. I maintain that we are ready right now for a good internet connected camera like brainstorming out loud. Imagine an iphone ui on a real full-frame, mirrorless camera, so a big sensor, big lens, but the processing power and computational photography with an m1 chip. Give this thing on board storage. Give it usb type c please and then you can throw pro in the name, and that would be great yeah. I would want one, but until then yeah galaxy camera was ahead of its time. So then number one last but not least, is the motorola atrix. Does anybody remember the motorola atrix? This was a smartphone.
It was a first phone with a dual core tegra 2 processor and it was the first android phone with a fingerprint sensor, powerful stuff, but most importantly, it could connect to something called the motorola lap dock. To give you a full laptop experience, powered completely off of your phone. It’S like whoa, wait a second. What is a computer right? I think we all basically like the general idea, the concept that you only buy one computer and then you plug this one, smallest computer, into bigger and bigger shells to become a bigger and bigger form factor and a bigger and bigger computer, because it’s so powerful at Its core right.
That idea is dope, but there’s two pretty big hurdles towards actually achieving that power and software so motorola with the atrix. They attack the software problem head-on right, so their version of android was called moto blur and when you plugged it into the lap dock immediately, that would turn into an experience pretty similar to what we have with samsung dex. Now full-on laptop looking thing: a dock, apps windows the whole deal, but the tougher challenge was definitely power right. So this phone came out in 2011..
The first dual core chip in any smartphone was a pretty big deal at the time. But let’s be real: it’s not powerful enough to be a full-fledged laptop, photo editing, video editing all that stuff, much less, even a chromebook at that time, and so this actually kind of creates a third problem on its own, basically, which is, if you buy into this Ecosystem this version of that idea, you’re kind of stuck this atrix costs 200 bucks on a two-year contract, but then the lap dock cost 500 extra dollars for basically a shell with a keyboard and a screen and a battery. If you upgraded your phone, you could no longer use your laptop, so the atrix didn’t hit right. But now in 2022 the computing power in smartphones has come a long way. People, you know in benchmarks and reviews might think we’re nitpicking and seeing if there’s a difference between the snapdragon 8gen 1 and the triple eight. But really.
The fact is all the extra headroom we’re getting has way more functionality. Besides just texting and using the phone like normal, it can become a computer. We also already know the m1 chips powering. The latest macbooks right now are based on a14 bionic from the iphone just scaled up. So you can imagine plugging the smartphone into a larger form.
Factor, even if it’s not a video editing machine still is a very capable laptop web browsing machine honestly, even photo editing would probably go very smoothly. Just like the way we see it on ipads plus, it’s obviously great having all your messages, but also all your apps and all your files, just with you all the time, no matter what machine you’re using so this idea definitely has legs for the near future. Honestly, the biggest problem that i see or the biggest obstacle in the way of it, is still the ecosystem problem specifically because a company like apple, would much rather have you buy an iphone and an ipad and a macbook than just to sell you, one computer, that Can be everything so there are some third-party attempts at a modern version of this there’s a company called next that makes the next dock. This is basically the same thing as the atrix, but over a usbc connection for samsung phones boom, portable dex laptop. But again, that’s only for samsung phones.
So really the fact that the whole ecosystem has to play for this idea to work makes it much harder than just one single gadget. So the atrix was for sure ahead of its time and probably will be for a little while longer, but i like the possibilities here i like, where we’re going with that one either way. Yeah vine was definitely ahead of its time. Fine walk, so tick. Tock could run all right thanks for watching catch. You guys in the next one peace.
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