The gadget arms race

The gadget arms race

In the main bar area at Stream, the gadget envy is palpable.

Everyone is sitting at tables with laptops.

Heaven help you if you have a pre-Intel Mac, or a Vaio with less than 2GB of RAM, or no wifi.

It’s the same with the phones.

What’s the point of having a device that can make phone calls when it doesn’t have a five megapixel camera on it, plus wifi and GPS?

And for those attendees toting separate camera, that camera had better be a Leica M8.

Such is the state of gadget oneupmanship at Stream.

But being up to date is not the only way to win on gadgets. If you’ve kept your ‘boneyard’ of discarded toys of yesteryear, they too can now be used to wow Stream delegates.

So the 1980s proto Blackberry is there, with its kilogram-sized battery, and dull mono screen; someone else produces a collection of every single Apple Newton ever made.

Of course, some people cheat with their gadgets.

All the Americans have iPhones with them. The onlookers from Europe and Asia are envious as the Americans swirl their fingers around the touchscreen interface.

Is that a European I see in front of me pretending to make a call on his iPod Touch? It has the same awesome interface, but it doesn’t make calls. Is the iPod Touch becoming like the fake phones that gas stations used to sell in the eighties, so that people stuck in traffic jams could pretend to other drivers that they had a car phone?

In the evening, the competition hots up, as the gadget competition, or Gadgethon starts, and everyone tries to out-geek the others.

Someone reveals his barbecue tongs with inbuilt lighting.

Others have robots, remote control helicopters and the highest of hi-tech toys.

Scoring is done via clapometer, linked to a video screen.

As the Gadgethon progresses, others wander out on to the beach to discuss mobile media.

Will mobile phone marketing break out of the SMS ghetto?

How to we sell to people via their mobile phones, when most people are still struggling to operate half the features on them?

The questions multiply.

Meanwhile on the side of the lawn, the BT wifi satellite uplink quietly hums as it sucks gigabits of data down from the heavens.