I hereby open the nominations for Stupid Gadget of the Year, and it should come to no surprise that the first candidate is from a company that has littered the world with plenty of stupid gadgets: Microsoft.Microsoft, as you may remember, has brought you such Instant Junk as last year's Zune audio device, for example. It had built-in WiFi, which could have been used to wirelessly connect to a music download service. But nooooooo. The WiFi was put in there to (in Steve Ballmer's own words) "squirt" a temporary music download to someone else with a Zune. (Just try to find two people in the same room outside Redmond, Wash., with Zunes.)
Not satisfied with 2006's undisputed Stupid Gadget of the Year, Microsoft has followed up with a candidate easily worthy of repeating last year's accomplishment: the Mobile Memory Mouse 8000 (I must have missed the previous 7,999 versions of the thing).
You're going to see some stories about this thing in the media in the next few days (after which, the talk about the thing will all dry up), and most of the stories are going to be dead wrong about the thing. Most media outlets are going to say that it's the first computer mouse with a built-in Flash drive.
But they're wrong.
The mouse doesn't have a Flash drive at all. The mouse is a wirless mouse -- with a 1GB Flash drive in the transceiver of the mouse. You see, you plug in the transceiver into a USB slot on your computer, and it acts as the bridge to relay information from the mouse to the computer. And it also can store about 1GB of information.
But it's much more complicated than that -- and that's where the problems lie:
-- It's also a Bluetooth mouse. Flip a switch on the mouse and it can operate via Bluetooth, without the need for the transceiver, unless you are also using it as a Flash drive, which means you must have it plugged in anyway.
-- You can carry the transceiver around to transfer data from the Flash drive to other computers, but if you leave it in another computer, you won't be able to use the transceiver for your mouse. If the computer's not Bluetooth, it's back to a wired mouse until you get the two parts back in the same room together.
-- The batteries in the mouse hold only a three-week charge, according to Microsoft. To recharge the batteries, you have to connect a cord between the transceiver and the mouse, and that doesn't exactly make it a wireless mouse anymore, does it?
-- A whole 1GB? Really? I'm sure that was a lot of space at some point in the 20th Century, but a quick look at the CompUSA website shows a couple of different 1GB USB Flash drives for only $11.99. Microsoft is charging $100 for its Flash drive/mouse combo -- quite a premium for such a misguided product. For that amount of money you could get one of three different 8GB USB Flash drives from CompUSA and use the free, wired (No batteries!) mouse you got with your computer.
Yes, the Microsoft Mobile Memory Mouse 8000 (I'll bet the guy who named this thing is getting a bonus this year!) is the first candidate for Stupid Gadget of 2007. Why not just go ahead and give Microsoft the award already? Why, there are more than three months left in the year. That gives Microsoft more than 100 days to come up with something even stupider (I'm betting on a new Zune that also dispenses three flavors of wine coolers).
« Home