DARIEN GRAHAM-SMITH
It’s the most preposterous, unmarketable ideas that sustain our love affair with technology
Dull success or glorious failure – which is hotter?
If you’ve listened to the PC Pro podcast, you’ll be familiar with our regular Hot Hardware segment. Each fortnight, one member of the team talks us through some brand-new gadget that they’ve been trying out, while the others pose questions and voice doubts. At the end, a virtual show of hands is held to decide, in unforgivingly binary terms, whether the item in question is hot or not.
In this simple format, Hot Hardware has been a regular fixture on the show for more than ten years. And I don’t see it going anywhere for the next ten because, let’s face it, we all love whizzy new toys, and happily it doesn’t look like the supply of candidates is going to dry up any time soon. For sure, the goalposts are constantly moving – some of the devices we turn our noses up at today would have blown the minds of our past selves – but there’s always something even more exciting just around the corner.
Hotness, mind you, is a rather subjective quality. Generally, there’s a consensus that it’s not just about functionality: more than once a new MacBook or Surface laptop has failed the test. It may be useful, but in the context of its predecessors and competitors, it simply doesn’t excite us.
Nor is it just about innovation. Over the years, we’ve explored some novel niches, from smart doorbells to solar-powered cycling accessories and NFC jewellery – but, to extend the metaphor, they’ve mostly left the team cold.
What’s much more contentious is the question of price, as demonstrated when I recently presented the Orbi Voice as our Hot Hardware candidate for episode 460 of the podcast. You’ll see from our review on p64 that there’s a lot to like about this Alexaenabled mesh Wi-Fi system; for me, the way it combines two technologies to produce something that’s neater, sharper-looking and more useful than either is the very definition of hot. But my colleagues – and our live listeners casting their own votes online – were turned off by its steep price.
I agree, it’s expensive. For the record, the kit costs £434, and yes, you can buy an ordinary mesh system and a standalone voice assistant for much less than that. That’s hardly the point, though: when a Ferrari roars past on the street, do you tut and wonder why the foolish driver didn’t buy a Nissan instead? Hot doesn’t necessarily mean affordable, or even practical. In some cases, it can mean the exact opposite.
I mention all this not just because I’m still bitter about being outvoted. It’s also been brought to mind lately by the emerging saga of the Samsung Galaxy Fold. In case the name doesn’t ring a bell, I’ll recap: in February, Samsung unveiled its next-generation flagship smartphone, with a novel folding screen and a launch price of £1,800. Commentators wondered out loud what the benefit was of the former, and why anyone would pay the latter to get it. No persuasive answers were forthcoming.
Then, in April, the first sample units were sent out and, within a matter of days, reviewers reported that those folding screens were starting to fail or had died completely. Some testers admitted that they had peeled off a screen covering that wasn’t supposed to be removable – a triumph of design, I’m sure you’ll agree. Others had done everything by the book and still experienced problems. As I write, all review units are being recalled for investigation, and the release has been postponed indefinitely.
Clearly, Samsung looks pretty ridiculous right now. If there exists, in this infinite universe, a specialist stand-up comedian who jokes about technology, I’m sure they’ll have a whole five-minute bit making fun of the Galaxy Fold.
Yet I want it on record that, if we’d had one of those first Galaxy Fold handsets on the podcast, I would have voted “hot”. That doesn’t mean I find the price particularly tempting. Nor have I managed to pin down the benefit of a folding screen.
But I’ve learnt to keep an open mind about such things. I still remember a Hot Hardware segment back in 2010, in which I declared that I couldn’t see any point to the new Apple iPad and deemed it stone cold. That very device went on to broaden the horizons of personal computing; today, there are two of the buggers sitting on my own coffee table. Do you really want to bet that, once they get the hardware sorted out, folding phones won’t take off in the same way?
Even if they don’t, it’s just great to see a bit of off-the-wall audacity in the tech industry, especially from a huge global corporation. Samsung wasn’t the first company to imagine a folding phone – Nokia mocked up a similar concept way back in 2008 – but that doesn’t diminish the bravery involved in trying to bring such a thing to market. It would have been easy and safe for Samsung to stick with its vastly successful line of conventional Android phones; instead, its boffins invented a completely new folding mechanism with the potential to destroy itself within a week’s normal use, and I love them for it.
Indeed, that’s why – even though I don’t always agree with my colleagues – I love our Hot Hardware discussions. On the podcast we spend 50-odd minutes picking over the news of the here and now; then we get a chance to gaze into a future that frequently seems crazy and impossibly ambitious, yet at the same time tantalisingly plausible. If that’s your definition of hot, the Samsung Galaxy Fold is one of the hottest phones ever created – and for once, when I say that about a Samsung phone, I mean it in a wholly positive sense.
I remember a Hot Hardware segment back in 2010, in which I declared that I couldn’t see any point to the new Apple iPad