The Gadget Show is back on our screens, kicking off on Monday 1st Feb with a show featuring everything from clothing that keeps you cool, Sat Nav phones, dune buggies, 3D TV and eBooks. The show was even more of an homage to (read, copy of) Top Gear and Brainiac than the last series – I think the male presenters must have been to the Jeremy Clarkson school of presenting during their break.
Amid the regular reviews of ultra thin TV’s (good times) and eReaders (bad times – I’m an eBook luddite), one actually sparked my interest. The team chucked an ioSafe Solo USB Rugged Hard Drive out of a three-storey window, blasted it in fire and dropped it into a swimming pool to test the manufacturer’s claims that whatever you put inside would survive*. “This is great!”, I thought. Having fallen victim to the draw of possessing beautiful yet flimsy hardware – I slipped on some ice and fell on the bag that housed my lovely brand new Toshiba Portege R500 Notebook – I’ve changed camps and for the time being am choosing function over form.
My colleague James O’Neill used to work for RM who made huge bulking great computers. Although you might have needed 4 people to lift it, it would only break whatever it was dropped on, whereas its competitor the Spectrum would break if you so much as looked at it the wrong way. Sure, I like my gadgets to look pretty, but they have to do what I expect them to do, otherwise I quickly lose interest. The gadget show looks pretty – it’s slick, the presenters are well groomed (I hesitate to say good looking but then I’m a girl,I reckon Suzi has quite a male following) – but the substance is lacking in substance.
After all that, and despite the obvious advertising inference, growing up with the Generation Game and Crackerjack makes the gadget giveaway horribly compelling. I had a two second fantasy where I won the lot and sat wallowing in the middle of a roomful of toys. I’ve succumbed and entered, which might spell the end of my desire to put function over form…
*For anyone that’s interested, the ioSafe Solo survived being thrown out of a window and being torched but not being thrown into a pool. So don’t take it swimming.
